


Time Sensitive

by skitzofreak



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst in the middle, F/M, I promise it will be a happy ending, Mission Fic, a study of time within the Star Wars universe, mild allusions to mental health issues, more or less, plays loose with the science of gravity wells and time dilation, the development of a relationship when two people are literally living at different speeds, the theory of relativity, there is a lot of grey, touch starvation, undercover Imperial Cassian, undercover contractor Jyn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-16
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-04-23 20:08:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 45,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14339994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skitzofreak/pseuds/skitzofreak
Summary: “It will pass the time, Major,” she replied, putting a faint emphasis on ‘time’ and quirking an eyebrow at him. He had the sudden, nonsensical feeling that she was going to step even closer, and wildly he imagined her slipping her arms around his body and pressing close against him. He scoffed at the notion – Jyn was impulsive and a little reckless, but not stupid.A part of him wanted desperately to do it for her anyway, move close and pull her in, feel her warmth and remember that the uniform was only a costume. Major Aldin Korr was only the shell of a monster around a real man.If he did reach out, maybe then the constriction in his lungs would at least have a reason, aside from his own nerves. (Maybe then he could breathe.)-Cassian and Jyn are working a mission in a system caught within a unique gravity envelope that alters the flow of time. How do you stay connected, when more than distance separates you?





	1. How long will I slide?

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by [this tumblr post](https://senator-mon-mothma.tumblr.com/post/161094548648/star-wars-never-really-explores-the-cool), which had some interesting points about the possible effect that various planetary time differences might have on the galactic society at large. While I didn't really want to get into the whole "which planets have greater prosperity just because their times and circadian rhythms match up with Coruscant" thing, I did like the idea of messing around with people caught in different time flows.

[Day 0 / The Certh Imperial Archives]

[Day 0 / The Shift]

[Day 0 / 0430 GST / Galactic Standard Calendar]

 

* * *

 

“Brace yourself,” Cassian told Jyn as she settled into the co-pilot seat next to him, the lights of the cockpit glinting on her heavily-gelled hair. “We’re about to hit the gravity field.”

Jyn cinched her safety harness tightly across her chest and lap, and Cassian bit back a smile at the stiff way that she moved her head. The tight bun and heavy dark makeup around her eyes was probably irritating her, but that was the style for contract transport pilots such as she was pretending to be. Or would pretend to be, in about thirty minutes when they reached their next destination. He sympathized with her discomfort – his beard was shaved down to a minimalist goatee and his clothes were starched to the point of rigidity, and though he had yet to don the heavy grey jacket of the Imperial officer he was about to impersonate, he could feel the weight of the costume already settling around his shoulders, weighing him down.

“What’s it feel like?” Jyn asked, distracting him from the dark cast of his thoughts. Or perhaps, he thought, glancing at the way her hands were gripping the arms of the co-pilot chair just a little too tight, she was trying to distract herself. Jyn had never been to the heavily guarded Certh system – too much risk, she’d said, not enough reward.

Cassian debated reaching across to rest his hand on top of hers, and decided that might come off a bit…patronizing. Instead, he shrugged. “The time transition? Just a little turbulence. You won’t feel time speeding up, I promise,” he threw her a brief smile that he hoped was at least vaguely reassuring. “We probably won’t notice anything odd at all until we leave and realize how little time has passed out in the rest of the galaxy.”

She opened her mouth, but before she could respond, the U-Wing shuddered, a small blue light flashed on the console, and then they were riding smooth again.

“And we’re in,” Cassian said casually, making a point of not reacting when Jyn let out a long, relieved sigh.  “Twenty minutes until dock.”

“I should start driving now,” Jyn murmured, but Cassian waved her off.

“No one will know.” Technically, for the sake of getting into their new fake personas’ mentalities, he probably should hand the controls over to her. But Jyn was never totally comfortable with the trickier aspects of flying, and docking at The Shift Station in Certh was incredibly finicky work. Cassian had done it once, years ago, and he mostly remembered the layout of the External Docks. Plus, it gave him something to do instead of obsessing over the details of this upcoming mission - a mission he was dreading, for more reasons than he really wanted to examine right now. Better to just focus on flying.

“Is that it?” Jyn leaned forward in her seat, clicking the safety harness free with an impatient swipe when it held her back at first (Cassian hid another grin and kept his eyes on the viewscreen; he’d been afraid of the time transition himself, when he had come here so many years ago).

A medium-sized grey-blue planet filled half the viewscreen, partially shadowed with night. The daylit side looked oddly smooth and unmarked – Certh had no oceans, only a massive crust of grey dust and eblerite metal rocks – but the nighttime side glittered with purple lights. The lights were mostly concentrated in huge squares of clustered purple, the epicenters of the individual archives. The sunlight was moving fast across the surface of the planet, fast enough that Cassian could actually see at least two of the huge city centers shifting from night to day in the five or six minutes he was watching, the purple lights snuffing out and leaving nothing to the space-faring eye but featureless grey-blue. Cassian eyed the surface and tried to pick out which glowing purple Archive he would be living and working in for the next two months. Well, technically for the next twelve hours. Except for Jyn it would be longer than that, wouldn’t it?

His head already hurt a little.

Jyn drew in a sharp breath, and Cassian tore his eyes away from Certh to look at their destination.

 _Mierda_. He’d forgotten.

“The Shift” was the waystation between Certh and the rest of the galaxy, caught just inside the gravitational envelope that altered Certh’s relative time to standard galactic time. Sometimes it was called “The Gateway” or “The Guardian,” or, for some of the more fanciful types, “Purgatory.” Time on The Shift moved faster than galactic standard time, but slower than time on the surface of the planet itself. It was a stepping-off point – private or commercial ships were not permitted to land on Certh’s surface, both due to the extreme gravity transition and because of Certh’s value to the Empire. So Cassian and Jyn had to dock at The Shift first.

And he had forgotten what it looked like, or at least, he had not thought about it enough to remember. Cassian mentally cursed again and glanced over at Jyn, guilt washing through him as he saw her narrowed eyes and tense shoulders. He should have remembered. He should have warned her.

The Shift was built like a wide ring, a thick grey disk floating in a loose orbit overhead the planet. Multiple ships, several of them distinctly Imperial – at least three Star Destroyers, he cataloged automatically – flowed to and from the outer rim of the ring, docking and departing in an intricate pattern. The inside of the ring was reserved for the specially-made reinforced shuttles that ran exclusively from Certh to The Shift and back down again, ferrying people and goods through the gravitational field. It was a bustling, well-lit, smoothly functioning, overtly Imperial space station.

“It looks like - ” Jyn started, then closed her mouth with a click. Her hands were once again too tight on the chair’s armrests, and Cassian swallowed.

“Scarif’s shield gate,” he finished for her, then wished he hadn’t.

The station loomed larger in their view. Cassian’s palms felt slick against the controls. He should have remembered. He should have warned her. His throat grew tight and his lungs constricted, and for a moment the U-Wing became a stolen Imperial shuttle, two dozen rebel soldiers concealed in the cargo bay and the stink of carbon-scoured metal and desperation in his nose as he watched the probable end of his life looming ever closer -

“It’s too high,” Jyn said abruptly. Cassian blinked and shot another glance at her, trying to keep his clammy hands from slipping on the flight controls. Her face was stony, her knuckles pale on the armrests, but she turned to look at him and lifted her chin as she spoke. “It’s too far away from the planet. Scarif’s station was a gate. Closer down.” She lifted one hand and made a general sweeping motion at the planet below, most of which appeared to be in sunlight from their angle now. Then she pointed at The Shift. “Too high,” she said again, and then to Cassian’s surprise, instead of dropping her raised arm to the armrest again, she stretched across the space between them and gripped his arm above his elbow. Her hand was warm through his shirt, and steady as a rock. “Tell me the time math again.”

“It’s a fourteen to one ratio, roughly,” Cassian’s voice came out too brittle, and he stopped, took three measured breaths, and started again. “I will be on Certh for seventy days. Twenty hour days on Certh means fourteen hundred hours for me.”

“Give or take your transit time,” Jyn interjected, parroting what he had said back on base, and Cassian felt his mouth pull into a faint smile. She ran her thumb in a small circle on his arm, and Cassian hoped she couldn’t feel his pulse spike suddenly at the soft touch.

“Right. The Shift runs on twenty-two hour days, though. You’ll be here roughly one hundred hours total, and living at a relatively slower rate, so one hour for you is fourteen hours for me.”

She kept her face turned towards him, not watching the space station outside as it slowly filled their viewscreen, blocking out even the dull white Imperial Star Destroyers floating like deadly icebergs nearby. “And a day for you is, what, an hour for me?”

“Hour and a half, more or less,” Cassian corrected. His shoulders were tensed, he realized, and he forced himself to drop them down and relax his jaw. The corner of Jyn’s mouth pulled up into a half smile.

“And my time conversion to the outside?” Jyn prompted as the comm crackled and a docking code flashed across his screen. The Shift was mostly automated, so he didn’t have to speak to anyone as he guided the U-Wing into the berth. He ought to be tense again, as the system ran through their sliced together codes and registered him as a visiting Imperial officer and Jyn as a hired contract transport, but the weight of her hand on his arm seemed to push back against those fears, grounding him.

“It’s an eight to one ration with you,” Cassian told her. “One hour for the Alliance will be roughly eight hours for you.”

“And you’re going to report to me every day,” Jyn nodded, her eyes still firmly on him as the U-Wing drifted gently up against the docking clamps and rocked slightly as they locked the ship into place. A faint hiss filled the U-Wing as the pressure equalized between the ship and the station. “So I’ll be getting a report every…”

“Two hours,” he supplied, raising an eyebrow at her because he had told her all this at least twice already and Jyn didn’t forget these kinds of details. She raised her own back at him, and then rubbed her thumb in a small circle again on his arm.

Ah. She was still distracting him. Cassian snorted and looked down at his lap, at the dull grey trousers and shiny black boots of the Imperial uniform that itched like a rash against his skin. Outside the viewscreen, he could see the exterior curve of The Shift Station stretching away from them, but not the interior ring, not the whole of it hovering over the Imperial planet below.

“And since I’m relaying that report through to the Alliance,” Jyn said in a cautious, low voice, as if someone outside the ship might hear her, “they’ll get your updates every fifteen minutes or so.”

“Or so,” Cassian agreed lightly, turning from the viewscreen to look at her instead. The heavy black makeup and tightly controlled hair made her look strange, but the rest of her clothes were familiar enough – the only concession she’d been willing to make to the mid-rim working class aesthetic aside from the mandatory makeup and hair was to throw a heavy black jacket over her clothes. She looked like someone too dangerous to screw with but not so dangerous as to call down Imperial security on her while she hung around The Shift, waiting for “her hire” to come back up.

“Okay?” Jyn asked softly, and Cassian looked down at her hand on his arm.

“Yeah,” he said in the same tone. “You?”

“I’m going to be hanging out in tea shops and people watching for a couple days,” she snorted. “You’re going to be trawling an Imperial archive for months.”

“Inspecting,” he corrected mildly, pushing himself up at last and taking down the Imperial uniform jacket hanging on the back of the cockpit. It was time, he supposed, to get into the role. “I am a data quality assurance inspector.”

Jyn hummed, leaning back in her chair and watching him don the jacket, straightening the cuffs meticulously and settling the pleats under the heavy black belt. He paused when he was done, holding the officer’s cap in one hand and rubbing a little ruefully at his shaved jawline with the other. He should have shaved entirely, he knew that. But he still had nightmares about the last time he had been completely bare-faced while wearing this uniform…it was a tiny rebellion, to only cut his beard into the short, neat goatee that lower-grade officers were permitted but not encouraged to wear. But for a long term mission like this, a small eternity of pretending to be the thing he hated most, well, Cassian had learned long ago to give himself whatever small things he could to hold on to, to ground himself in the face of oncoming pain. It was a torture-resistance technique, writ large in the face of the long, slow grinding of his soul. He closed his eyes, scratched the short hair on his chin and then brushed his thumb along the smooth skin of his jaw and sighed. “Major Aldin Korr. Imperial officer. Data quality inspector,” he reminded himself grimly.

Jyn’s fingers skimmed his jawline just behind his own, and Cassian’s eyes flew open. She stood close enough that he could smell the faint mix of cheap soap, high grade gun oil, and leather that always meant _Jyn_ to him. She caught his eyes, her fingertips gentle against his exposed skin, and tilted her head, her face serious but her eyes bright. “Thief,” she said, and despite the scrape of starched Imperial cloth against his skin, Cassian felt a weak laugh rise in his chest.

“That too,” he nodded, and tried not to miss her when she dropped her hand and stepped back.

“I’m contracted to make sure you get to your shuttle, Major,” she drawled with an ironic twist to her smirk. “So shall we?” She walked down to the airlock and stood with her hand on the switch, waiting for him. Cassian took a deep breath, then set the cap neatly over his close-cropped hair.

“Lead the way, Contractor Wyla.”

The docking bays were relatively quiet, the constant, muffled thumping of ships docking and detaching combined with the hiss of airlocks overrode most conversation. The heavy insulation all along the walls to prevent radiation from the nearby twin suns also gave the area a hushed, oppressive atmosphere, and most sentients moved swiftly through the austere docking zone in a hurry to be elsewhere. Of course, that might have had less to do with the stifled quality of the docking bay and more to do with the stormtroopers stationed by every major airlock and at several control stations throughout the grey corridors.

Cassian strode out of the docking area with Jyn close to his heels – potentially a little too close, but he kept his face neutral and didn’t say anything, and neither did she, and no one glanced twice at them as they breezed through security scanners and checkpoints, Cassian’s Imperial Inspector scandocs buying them plenty of deference and even averted eyes in a few cases. Inspectors, Cassian had learned from his briefing packet, were powerful agents in the Certh system, where the economy lived or died on an inspector’s assessment of Certh’s archives’ efficiency. And so, of course, did the slaves who worked the data in the massive archives down there.

The Bothan slave working at the final security check before they passed into the main station tapped in Cassian’s fake registration code with shaking finger. Cassian’s uniform collar sat heavy around his throat like a weighted chain, his shiny black boots heavy as duracrete blocks, and he only moved through the checkpoint when Jyn nudged against his back.

On the other side of the grey, sterile docking area doors, the station was brightly lit, heavily trafficked, and noisy in that genteel way that large Imperial-run shopping districts tended to be. Four levels of open-faced stores stacked neatly on top of one another stretched in both directions, selling everything, electronics and clothing and house wares and more, interspersed with a variety of restaurants and cafes. Cassian strode purposefully through the orderly chaos, Jyn hard on his heels, and tried not to catalog all the different things that the rebellion was constantly scrounging for their people which were readily available for exorbitant prices here in this cheerfully lit touristy shopping center. Food, for example; there was so much food here that he could actually see people chucking half eaten meals into waste bins, could see boxes of food sitting behind several of the restaurants, clearly full and just as clearly marked for trash pick up. Several stores had enough electronic parts glowing from their shelves to make the eternally short-handed droid techs weep. There was even a store specializing in hospital scrubs, something the medical division was eternally griping about needing. Jyn’s elbow dug into his side at one point, and he saw her looking at a store front with dozens of beautifully crafted boots for bipedal beings, all laid out in an enticing display. He grit his teeth and passed it without pause, and Jyn only slowed a fraction behind him before stretching out her legs to catch back up.

But it wasn’t the noisy crowd or the riot of smells that really caught a newcomer’s attention, here in this consumer paradise. The radiation insulation in the exterior docking bays was not necessary in the heart of The Shift, and the designers had left all the metal paneling, arching beams, elegant columns, and shining floors exposed. Rather than durasteel construction, The Shift had been made from a local metal with singular properties. Cassian was prepared for it, but Jyn twitched when they passed a blank wall between two shops, her eyes going wide before she caught herself and went back to looking bored and vaguely pissed off.

“Eblerite,” Cassian dropped his voice under the babble of the crowd, moving just a touch closer to her so she could still hear clearly (and because the corridor was narrowing around them, the crowd pressing in on both sides, the bright flashing signs of the nearest stores hanging just a little lower and giving the impression that the ceiling was dropping - not that he minded. It was fine. It would open up again soon. Breathe.) “It's mined on Certh. Excellent conductor of energy. They make most of the Certh Archives from them, because it’s an efficient material for computers.”

“And the Empire loves efficiency,” she said dryly, eyeing the purple-grey metal floor beneath their feet. “But why does it look like…” she waved a hand at the surface, scowling.

“Eblerite only reflects organic matter,” Cassian shrugged, although the move felt oddly difficult under the stiff jacket, like the weight of it was pinning his shoulders down. “No one’s really clear on why. But that’s why you see all those distorted shapes. It’s only showing the exposed organic matter.”

“So that’s my head,” she pointed down at the murky shape floating a little bit in front of her feet. “And that’s yours,” she shifted to the shape floating just next to and above her own. “But the rest of us is covered, so it won’t show up?”

“It’s a sturdy metal, and a good conductor,” Cassian shrugged again, this time more to roll his shoulders against the weight of the jacket than to communicate anything specific. Jyn glanced at him with something like sympathy – she could probably tell how uncomfortable he was. The last time he had worn an Imperial uniform, he thought abruptly, she had been there, too, and they had walked together out into the sands of Scarif –

“It’s shite,” Jyn announced bluntly, still glowering at the floor beneath their feet. Cassian agreed; the random flashes of disembodied heads and hands (and occasionally legs or arms from the Shift patrons around them) that popped up on the bits of undecorated wall or support pillars that they passed was highly off-putting. 

“They call it Spirit Stone, down on the surface,” Cassian said aloud. “Apparently local legends claimed you could see the past and the future in it as well as the present.”

Jyn eyed the next pillar as they passed it. “Just looks like ghosts.”

Cassian nodded, watching her from the corner of his eye. The scowl on her face only deepened as they passed through the shopping center, her own discomfort in crowds combining with the unsettling distortion of the eblerite construction around them. Possibly she wasn’t too comfortable about the upcoming separation between them either, but then, he might be projecting.

Whatever her reason, Jyn became more surly and tense as they walked. It bothered Cassian more than just seeing his partner in distress. If this was to be his last few moments with her (he hoped not, oh, he hoped – but if it _was_ ), a part of him flinched at the idea that she would spend them unhappy and closed off. Worse still, after he left her, she would have to walk back through the crowds and the smells and the obviously placed security cameras and guards - alone.

They passed a small tea shop that wafted a variety of pleasant smells out to them, and Cassian bumped Jyn’s arm with his own and nodded at it. “Rob it,” he said, timing it so that a blaring PA announcement covered any possible chance of someone other than Jyn hearing him. At her startled expression, he smirked and added, “theoretically.”

Jyn turned to scan the tea shop as they walked by the open doors, eyeing the harassed looking baristas and the glowing kiosks at the counter where customers paid. “Keylogger program on the kiosks,” she said after a thoughtful moment. “Pretend to be a customer putting in an order, swipe a virus card instead of a credit chip, come back the next day and pick up all the data the keylogger stored over the last twenty-four hours. Twenty-two hours, I mean,” she corrected quickly, cutting him off.

Cassian shook his head. “That would just get you the customers’ credit data. You wouldn’t be robbing the store.”

Jyn rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she grumbled, “Block and switch virus, during rush hour. The dinner hour. Whatever. It would only work for about an hour before someone got suspicious that none of the credit transactions were clearing through to the store, but I could probably make a decent payload off it before I had to walk away.”

Cassian nodded thoughtfully, and they walked in silence for a few more seconds, then he gestured to a large digital entertainment store, holovids projecting on the windows and loud music blaring out of the door. “Rob that.”

Jyn cocked an eyebrow at him; she was on to him, but then, he’d known what she was doing in the U-Wing, too, and it had still helped. So he waited quietly, passing a group of vacationing Humans who shuffled nervously out of his path. Jyn scowled at the barely concealed worry on the tourists’ faces, and then jerked her chin towards the entertainment store. “Waterhole attack,” she said. “Set up a free holonet access point, make it lead to a fake holonet site for the store. Put some “coupons”,” she made air quotes with her fingers, her voice dripping with sarcasm, “and back-channel link it to their real holosite. When people log in to their customer accounts, use that as an access point to the store’s accounts. Clean them out, move on.”

“That one,” Cassian pointed to a jewelry shop full of overwrought headdresses and gaudy necklaces. He held up a finger before she could start speaking. “But you only have thirty minutes and whatever equipment you are carrying.”

Jyn smirked.

Several minutes later, they arrived at the Interior Docks, crossing from the sensory assault of the shopping area into another insulated, muffled grey series of terminals and airlocks. Cassian felt significantly calmer by that point (and much more informed about the security systems of large commercial retailers), and Jyn’s hands were no longer balled into fists in her jacket pockets. But as they walked past a line of stormtroopers, all of whom saluted Cassian as he nodded absently and marched onward, he could feel the tension locking up his spine again. His assigned pick up point came up faster than he was prepared for, and abruptly Cassian found himself standing in front of an airlock with a weary shuttle employee in grey coveralls tapping his datapad listlessly. Jyn came to a halt next to him, standing further away than she had since…he wasn’t sure, actually. Awhile.

“Good luck, Major Korr,” she said in a forced-casual voice, overshooting ‘neutral’ to land somewhere in ‘awkward.’

“Thank you, Contractor Wyla,” he replied formally.

“Shuttle departs in a few minutes, sir,” the employee said flatly, apparently one of the few in The Shift not concerned with the potential destructive power of an Imperial data inspector. He walked away with his datapad tucked under his arm, passing through an employee door, presumably to prep the shuttle for launch. The indistinct reflections of his head and hands moved alongside him in the dull purple-grey of the eblerite airlock doors. Cassian and Jyn’s distorted faces remained behind, floating eerily in the otherwise blank surface. His instincts were screaming about the sheer wrongness of that empty image – the lack of reflection from all the stormtroopers around them only seemed to emphasize their presence rather than erase it. Cassian clenched his teeth and looked deliberately away from the airlock.

But the only other place to look was at his partner, who was eyeing the doors like she was thinking of punching them. Her aggressive disgust made him feel mildly better, but then she turned and caught him looking, and Cassian only just stopped himself from jumping guiltily, as if he’d been caught peeking through a window.

The airlock chimed, and a synthetic voice chirped, "Shuttle departure in ten minutes. Please standby for boarding."

The muffled silence took on a new quality, heavier, thicker. It felt vaguely like someone pressing a cloth over his face. Cassian took a deep breath and concentrated on the sensation of his lungs pushing out against his rib cage. It still didn’t feel like quite enough, but he couldn’t think about the fear clamping on to his chest or his throat. He would only amplify it, give it real weight and power over him.

“Major,” Jyn stepped a little closer, and despite himself, despite the stormtroopers standing idly a few paces away and the security cameras and the scanners all probably recording every second of this, Cassian fought the urge to step in as well, close the gap between them and lower his head to speak to her privately. He fought it, of course, but he still thought about it, and much more than he should. “I want a check-in, too,” she told him. “For me, I mean. Not a report, just a...note. Something. A word. In the mornings, maybe, or whenever works for you. Just - ” she paused, checked over his shoulder towards the stormtroopers, then said in a louder, glib voice, “I like to know that my hire is still on schedule. Got other contracts to fill, don’t want to waste my time hanging around sitting on my hands.”

She wanted a check-in from him, aside from the daily report? Cassian risked a quick scan over Jyn’s head and noted at least two security cameras pointing his way. In a careful voice, he said, “Recall that time is quicker on Certh, Contractor. That might be more messages than you bargained for.” He met her eyes and tried to let her see his question without making it obvious to any observers - _are you sure?_ _do you really want that many messages from me? the report will let you know I'm still alive and_ _functioning, do you really want more?_  – and to his relief, she actually rolled her eyes a little and smiled.

“It will pass the time, Major,” Jyn replied, putting a faint emphasis on ‘time’ and quirking an eyebrow at him. He had the sudden, nonsensical feeling that she was going to step even closer, and wildly he imagined her slipping her arms around his body and pressing close against him. He scoffed at the notion – Jyn was impulsive and a little reckless, but not stupid.

A part of him wanted desperately to do it anyway, move close and pull her in, feel her warmth and remember that the uniform was only a costume. Major Aldin Korr was only the shell of a monster around a real man.

If he did reach out, maybe then the constriction in his lungs would at least have a reason, aside from his own nerves. (Maybe then he could breathe.)

Or maybe they would both get caught and killed. _Breathe, Andor._

No, wait, that wasn’t right.

_Get a grip, Major Korr._

“Very well,” he said at last, his voice clipped and impersonal. “I will keep you apprised.”

The airlock hissed open, and Jyn stepped back. She opened her mouth, then snapped it shut and gave him a curt nod, which he returned.

She turned on her heel and walked away without a backward glance, and Cassian’s chest was so tight now that his vision turned grey and fuzzy around the edges. _Breathe,_ he ordered himself ruthlessly. _Breathe and get on the shuttle._

He was the only passenger, but several large crates were secured in the back half of the transport. Cassian sat in one of the empty chairs and tried not to feel like so much cargo being hauled away for consumption. The shuttle operator was just as disinterested in him as the reception employee (possibly it was the same person), because they never bothered to speak over the PA or check back to make sure he was strapped in. The shuttle simply closed its doors and pulled away with a graceless jerk from the Interior Docks. Cassian allowed himself one last look out the portal towards The Shift, and thought he caught a glimpse of a figure in dark clothes pressed against the viewport next to the docking clamps with her hands against the plas-glass, but the shuttle turned before he could get a good look at her.

To call the ride “bumpy” would be a generous assessment – it was like the pilot was attempting to jolt all the bones out of Cassian’s skin. He kept his hands tight around the armrests and his teeth grit hard together to prevent himself from accidentally biting his own tongue. The closer they got to the surface, the more abruptly the gravity field responsible for Certh’s unique time flow shifted, and the rougher the ride became. It probably wasn’t the pilot’s fault at all.  And anyway, these shuttles were built specifically to withstand these short jaunts through both time and space – so they probably wouldn’t rattle apart in the sky and rain down in pieces over the surface.

Cassian closed his eyes and ran through the time differentials in his head again. Fourteen to one ratio between himself and Jyn. Eight to one ratio between Jyn and the Alliance. He would send her a report once every evening, which for her was every two hours. He would send a personal message every morning, which would arrive on her console a half an hour (specifically, twenty-six minutes) after his report. The shuttle jolted so hard that Cassian temporarily lifted up from his seat. Grimly, he tightened the lap belt. Twenty six minutes and thirteen seconds, to be precise, assuming he always sent the report and the personal message at the exact same times every day.

Jyn wouldn’t be getting much sleep these next five days, if she fired off his reports immediately every time. Of course, neither would he, but for different reasons.

 _Probably_  for different reasons. (She had looked at him, there in the docking bay, like she wanted to step close and wrap him in her arms, and _maybe_ he was just projecting but _maybe_ \- )

At long, long last, the rattling smoothed out and the view outside of Cassian’s portal turned from the dark emptiness of space to the dull grey-blue emptiness Certh's sky. They were in Certh’s atmosphere and gravity envelope. Two distant blue suns glowed over his shoulder, and Cassian twisted in his seat to squint a bit at them. Enough light to see by, but there was something uncomfortably dim about them, too. He wondered if the muted sunlight was the reason Imperial officers were supplied with extra vitamin pills while serving on this planet. It seemed probable.

The shuttle dropped lower, and Cassian finally saw the Archives.

They were built like stepped pyramids, all made from the same purple-grey eblerite as The Shift, and they each rose easily a hundred levels above the equally grey ground. From space, he had assumed that the Archive pyramids would be centrally located in the cities, with smaller buildings radiating around them, but now he saw that there _were_ no other buildings. The entirety of Certh’s civilization was housed inside these massive pyramid structures, with no other signs of external life save for the local trams flying between pyramids and The Shift shuttles slipping into the traffic flow here and there.  No personal gravcars or large public trams joined the sky traffic, only the small shuttles floating serenely between the top levels of the pyramids and nowhere else.

That struck him as odd, as he looked down at the empty spaces between the lower levels, and then he remembered the preparatory brief for this mission. It had mentioned “slave housing and facilities existed in the lower structures” and the servers themselves were in the upper levels, but he hadn’t realized how literal that was. As his Shift shuttle maneuvered between two of the massive pyramids, Cassian squinted through the large viewscreens embedded in the “steps” and noted that the very top levels seemed to bustle with people in Imperial uniforms, the middle were mostly glowing with the artificial purple-grey light of huge server boxes, and the bottom levels had only the narrowest of viewscreens, too thin to see anything through and probably too small to allow much of the weak sunlight in. Only the top levels had any transports, because only the top level people were allowed to move about at will.

A laugh splintered into razorblades in his chest and then dissolved into bitter dust in his mouth. It seemed that the Imperials – and the massive data banks they kept on this planet – actually perched on top of the people who did their labor. A symbolic and literal boot on the neck, and Major Korr was assigned to one of those top layers. Would any of the people who lived in the dark bottom levels - and kept these precious data archives operating, processing all of the Empire’s vast reams of data in a fraction of the time it would take anyone out in “real time” space - even see him up here? Or would he just stand on their heads and steal their work for the rebellion and walk away without even glimpsing any of their faces?

The shuttle touched down on a landing pad on the ledge of one of the pyramids, about mid-way up the imposing featureless structure, and Cassian unclipped his belt and reminded himself that if the Empire was overthrown, one of Mothma’s primary objectives was “immediate liberation and compensation to any enslaved or wrongfully imprisoned individual.”

If the Empire fell, this would be one of the first places to feel the real impact of it, the effects taking place much faster in here than they would out in the slower galaxy.

If the Empire fell, the people he was standing over today would be free.

But first, the Empire had to fall, and it wasn’t going to do that on its own.

Cassian adjusted his jacket and made sure his rank was centered precisely according to regulations, and walked out of the shuttle as soon as the doors slid open.

Several workers shuffled nervously past him to get to the crates that had come down with him, none of them making any eye contact at all. The pilot remained in the cockpit, as uninterested in him (or afraid of him) as they were on The Shift.

The Shift. Cassian allowed himself one brief glance up at the sky, where he could just make out the ringed shape of the distant station. Logically, he knew that it wasn’t actually racing across the sky like it was about to jump to hyperspace and leave him behind. Logically, he knew it was just the light being distorted through the gravity field as everything else. But his heart thumped in momentary fear anyway, imagining Jyn on board as the station flashed away into the distance and left him alone in his grey uniform on the grey landing pad atop this giant grey pyramid.

With, he noted with a snap, another grey uniform moving straight for him.

“Major Korr,” an older Human male wearing a lieutenant’s insignia called with a startling amount of cheerfulness. “Lieutenant Marion Raeth,” he saluted a touch sloppily. Cassian returned the salute with a detached expression, and waited. Raeth gestured grandly at the pyramids, and up close, Cassian could see the brittle edges to the man’s smile. “I am assigned to show you to your assigned quarters and designated office space, if you will follow me, sir,” he said cheerily, and then turned on his heel and marched towards an entrance to the pyramid.

“Oh and, Major,” Raeth grinned back over his shoulder, the slightly-vacant smile of a man teetering on the edge of some abyss. “Welcome to hell.”


	2. The Other Side

[Day 5 / The Certh Imperial Archives]

[Day 1 / The Shift]

[Day 0 / 0524 GST / Galactic Standard Calendar]

[Incoming Message]

[Encryption Key: 328FB3UGNH Pai7J428GN]

[Key Accepted]

[Decoding…]

 

File Attachment: [DAY5_CERTH_FULCRUM_REPORT]

 

[Aryss Archive Server 75204757124D56FU2 Backup Files]

[Scroll Up For More…]

[Personnel Files: Stormtrooper Fitness Reports: [Select Unit to Review Evaluations]]

[Personnel Files: Officer Review Boards: [Select Individual to Review Personal File]]

[Inventory: Tactical Weaponry: Ground Unit: Small Arms: [Select Unit to Review]]

[Scroll Down For More…]

 

* * *

 

[Incoming Message]

[Encryption Key: 328FB3UGNH_PAI7J428GN]

 

[Secondary Encryption Required]

[Encryption Key: K2SO_WOULD*HATE!THIS^PASSWORD%]

[Key Accepted]

[Decoding…]

 

Subj: Day 4

To: Wyla

From: Korr

Alive. Secure. ~~Coping.~~

The Shift crosses assigned quarter’s window twice a day. ~~I keep calculating how much time has passed for you since I lef~~    It’s a strange sight.

Be safe.

 

[Delete Message Y/N?]

 

* * *

 

Cassian stood in the elevator and watched the light flash across Jyn’s face, catching in her green eyes, highlighting the splash of red blood on her shoulder, streaking across her brown hair. Outside, he knew the battle raged, knew that people lived and died and fought for the right to choose between the two, knew that machines exploded in fire and rained hot metal down, knew that somewhere in space the great cruisers and destroyers clashed in titanic rage. But in the elevator, there was no sound save the hum of the servos and the harsh breathing of two exhausted people. In the elevator, there was no light save the flashing emergency lights embedded in the walls of the shaft that flickered as they passed. In the elevator, there was no war, no mission, no fight.

Cassian leaned against the cold metal railing and watched the silent light flash across Jyn’s face, illuminating the green of her eyes before fading back into shadow. Light, green eyes, shadow, light, green, shadow, a comforting rhythm, like a heartbeat or the soft blinking lights of the flight console in hyperspace, light, green, shadow – except – except –

Cassian leaned forward, a seedling of fear budding in his heart, growing vines of cold terror that curled up into his throat, but he wasn’t imagining it, wasn’t imagining what he was seeing in Jyn’s face. Every time the light flashed over her, the green of her eyes dimmed a little more, turning flatter and greyer. He opened his mouth to speak but the silence was now smothering, crushing down any words as the terror sank its bitter thorns into his skin and tore him apart from the inside out.

Cassian woke to clammy skin, twisted gunmetal grey bed sheets, and the faint dove grey light seeping around the edges of the poorly-fitted blackout filters on his little apartment’s window. The chrono on the wall next to the (pale grey) door told him it was an hour before he had to clock in to his (charcoal grey, windowless) office, which meant he was up about thirty minutes sooner than planned. He stared at his ceiling (low, smooth, slate grey) and tried to shove the mental image of Jyn fading into colorless nothing out of his head. It was too early for this kind of nightmare. He was only six days in to this undercover op, less than a week, and still a long way to go.

Still, he couldn’t stop turning the dream over in his head as he pushed himself up and dressed in his austere (scratchy, Imperial grey) uniform. His own reaction was the most puzzling part of the whole thing – even several minutes later, as he shaved the precise line of his beard and scrubbed his face clean, his heart still felt too rapid, his skin too cold. Compared to some of his more regular nightmares, this one seemed almost tame. It was really more of a memory, with the exception of Jyn’s fading eyes. Cassian shook his head and combed his hair with a critical eye to the length around his ears. Imperial regulations were strict on hair length; he would need a trim soon.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw someone move – no, only the blurry reflection of his exposed skin in the eblerite metal in the walls. Only his own disembodied, featureless head shadowing him throughout the room.

As if he didn’t already have enough trouble sleeping.

Was it fear for himself, he wondered as he buttoned the collar of the (relentlessly grey) jacket, or fear for his partner that prompted the nightmare? He was used to the former, the latter was something new. Cassian had been afraid for other people before, of course; any child growing up in the struggling rebellion knew how that felt. But this, this felt different. This felt like…

He grimaced, picking up his (slightly darker grey than the uniform, it must have been cut from a different bolt of cloth) cap and glaring at it. At the small fold-out table, a small red light on his datapad blinked on and off, one of the few tiny spots of non-grey in the entirety of his quarters, possibly in the whole of the Archives. That red light indicated that his outgoing report last night had been sent into the relay network where it was probably still working its way through the time distortion before it made it to Jyn. He would have no way of knowing if it made it through until he left the planet. Jyn couldn’t confirm every message received, not when all the signals would cross in time and leave him more confused than informed as to which report she meant. All the later confirmations wouldn’t make it through the distortion until he was already off this rock anyway.

There was no reason for him to dwell on the lack of acknowledgement. He was used to going long periods without any external contact or confirmation. It was normal. This was normal.

The little red light blinked again – _message sent, receipt unknown_ – and that was fine.

Cassian glanced at the chrono and set the cap back down next to the datapad. Still some time left before he had to put it on his head, before he had to put Major Aldin Korr on his face and on his thoughts. Not much time, of course, but he knew from experience that every minute without the strain of the lie was precious on long ops like these. He could use these few minutes to send off another note to Jyn, and then maybe consider his plan of action for the day. He had spent his time so far sitting in the assigned office for roughly twelve hours a day, running through endless data files and fishing out the fragments of any information that had any potential strategic use to the ground and fleet forces of the Alliance, anything that could keep another operative alive in enemy territory, _hells_ , anything the quartermasters and hanger crews could use to keep everyone fed and clothed one day more. The tricky bit was copying it over without leaving data trails, because the Certh Archives was one of the largest, most complex computer systems in the galaxy, second possibly only to Coruscant.

Speaking of the Archives – Cassian checked the chrono and hurriedly stepped away from the nearest wall, bracing himself. His alarm was about to go off.

The chrono ticked over to the top of the hour, and right on time, the pyramid’s walls hummed suddenly, a loud, unpleasant sound that lasted about thirty seconds and made the very marrow in Cassian’s bones vibrate uncomfortably. The slate-grey walls took on the faintest purplish hue as the micro-circuits embedded in the metal fluoresced with energy, and then faded again, leaving only the memory of their complex patterns behind. It had been pretty, the first time he’d seen an Upload, but the novelty had worn off and now he could only grit his teeth and wait for the buzzing sensation to fade from his body. Morning Upload, he thought grimly, right on time. He had about twenty minutes to message Jyn, and then catch the elevator up seventeen floors to his office.

The faint reflection of his head in the eblerite walls seemed to drift across the corner of his eye again, which was impossible, because he wasn’t moving. Trick of the poor light in here.

A small green light flashed on his datapad next to the red, a tiny beacon of light that drew his eye. Cassian blinked, then his brain recognized what he was seeing and he lunged for the ‘pad, hitting the Receive button eagerly. Two prompts for his encryption key (and he still smiled a little when he entered the secondary password that Jyn had picked out, although he had only input it twice and she probably had…how many times? Twelve? Thirteen? No, twelve, so the joke was probably wearing thin for her) and at last the message scrolled across his screen.

 

-

 

Subj: RE: Day 4

To: Korr

From: Wyla

Good. Also secure.

Certh rotates so fast. Can't keep track of day and night cycles unless I do the math. Almost night up here now. Going to get food, will be back in 1 hr (=1 day for you?)

Stay safe

 

[Delete Message Y/N?]

 

-

 

Cassian took a long, slow breath. She was alive. Safe. The knowledge was comforting (if he ignored that it was a couple days old, working it’s way through the distortion), though the message was a little…disappointing. Well, what did he expect? His messages were no different. Short, to the point, nothing to incriminate either of them should they be intercepted. At best, he could claim they were just updates to his hired transport. At worst, he could claim she was an old family retainer. Imperial officers often came from the kinds of families that had that sort of thing.

Cassian read her message through again, and reminded himself that six days for him had only been about eight or nine hours for Jyn. He’d hardly been gone an entire shift, from her perspective. She wouldn’t miss him as he missed –

She wouldn’t miss him already.

 

 -

 

Subj: Day 6

To: Wyla

From: Korr

Alive. Secure. Hope dinner was good. Food here is dull. It even tastes grey and

 

 -

 

He paused, shook his head, started to delete the last two sentences – and then stopped. Why not? It was nothing incriminating, nothing subversive. Just an employer being polite to his hired help, just an officer complaining about military food. Besides, the point of these messages was to prove to her that he was alive. Messages that could be generated by an algorithm would hardly achieve that objective.

Cassian wiped his hand absently down the side of his (miserably grey) trousers and retyped the last line, and then…kept going.

 

 -

 

Subj: Day 6

To: Wyla

From: Korr

Alive. Secure. Hope dinner was good. Food here is dull. It even tastes grey and regimented. The food drops down through an efficient little food elevator that I access through a flap in the wall of my quarters, and the trash goes into a different flap when I’m done. If there is a social space for officers in this part of the Archive, I haven’t found it, or looked too hard. If I didn’t see other people walking by in the hall, or occasionally get comms from different divisions to offer me data for inspection, I would think I was alone in this place. This is possibly the simplest and yet strangest work I’ve done in a long time.

There is a lieutenant who comes to talk to me sometimes, possibly because he is lonely. I understand w

 

 -

 

No, no, wait, that was…too much. Carefully, he deleted the last two sentences, and simply wrote “be safe” in it’s place. There. Good enough. He hit send before he could talk himself out of it. It probably wouldn’t get to her for…it was nearly 0600 for him? Compensate for the rotation and add the dilation variable and she would probably get his message in about three hours and twenty-six minutes (Certh time) but he wouldn’t receive an answer for another twenty one hours and forty-six –

Someone pounded on his door. Cassian’s heart leaped; he deleted Jyn’s message with a quick swipe and grabbed his cap, taking a moment to steel his spine. The blurred reflection of his head flattened on top, where the synthetic material of the cap blocked his organic reflection without casting any reflection itself. It made the already eerie effect of the eblerite metal even more unsettling.

Cassian turned his back on the reflection and strode to the door. If he’d been found out, he reminded himself sternly, the enforcers come to kill him wouldn’t be _knocking_. Major Aldin Korr, Imperial Archive Inspector. Aloof, work-oriented, loyal to the Empire. Major Korr. Major Korr.

“Morning, Major,” Lieutenant Raeth grinned at him when he opened the door. “Had to come pick up my assistant from the bowels of the Archive,” he jerked his head over his shoulder at the blank-faced Neimoidian slave following him at a careful distance (Cassian resisted the urge to roll his eyes, because of course it was one of the grey-skinned Neimoidians). “And since I was in your corner of the pyramid, thought I’d swing in and escort you up to the office. Are your accommodations, heh,” he swept a laconic hand past Cassian, into his metal box-like quarters, “ _amenable?_ ”

“Yes, Lieutenant,” Cassian said flatly, infusing his expression with as much professional ice as he could. Was Raeth here because he was an impertinent asshole stuck in a dead-end job and didn’t think it mattered if he annoyed a superior officer, or because he suspected Cassian of something and was snooping around to confirm? Cassian kept his gaze blank and his eyes steady on the lieutenant, waiting for the other man to lead the conversation, giving him nothing to work with, nothing to hint at Cassian’s thoughts or mental state. The nice thing about being a mid-ranked Imperial officer, he thought with no small irony, was the general belief that they were all unfriendly and unwilling to chatter. People didn’t tend to expect a lot of emotional acting on his part.

Small relief, but still a relief.

Raeth, however, did not seem even vaguely deterred. “Well, then, Sachee and I are on your lead, sir,” he stepped back from the door and saluted. The gesture was as crisp as any drill sergeant could desire, but the permanent faint grin still hovered on Raeth’s face, as if half his mind was stuck on some internal joke. Not, Cassian thought as he stepped outside and led the way to the nearest elevator, that it seemed a particularly pleasant joke. Three featureless faces drifted after them on both sides of the corridor, the Neimoidian’s grey skin almost (but not quite) blending into the metal entirely.

It was going to be, Cassian thought with some resignation, a long day.

 

* * *

 

[Day 14 / The Certh Imperial Archives]

[Day 1 / The Shift]

[Day 0 / 0645 GST / Galactic Standard Calendar]

 

Attachment: [DAY13_CERTH_FULCRUM_REPORT]

 

[Aryss Archive Server 75204757124D56FU2 Backup Files]

[Scroll Up For More…]

[Inventory: Official Supply Routes (Chommel Sector): [Select Ship to Review Schedule]]

[Inventory: Unofficial Supply Routes: [Select Individual to Review Personal File]]

[Inventory: Tactical Weaponry: Ground Unit: Surface to Air: [Select Unit to Review]]

[Scroll Down For More…]

 

* * *

 

Subj: Day 13

To: Wyla

From: Korr

Alive. Secure. I was offered time on a shooting range, located in another Archive. Offer came via netmail, no actual person showed up to talk to me. ~~I’m starting to think it’s really just me and Raeth and the ghosts in the walls.~~ I almost went just for the chance to be somewhere else. Stupid, of course, the pyramids all look the same ~~and I can’t let them know that my skills are~~ and the tram ride is uncomfortable anyway. ~~I hope you’re having a better time~~

~~Is it as exhausting up there for you as it is fo~~

~~If you can, I’d appreciate a reply to let me know you are~~

Be safe ~~please~~.

 

[Delete Message Y/N?]

 

* * *

 

Cassian stood in the elevator and watched the light flash across Jyn’s face, catching in her green eyes, highlighting the splash of red blood on her shoulder, streaking across her brown hair. Outside, he knew the battle raged, knew that people lived and died and fought for the right to choose between the two, knew that machines exploded in fire and rained hot metal down, knew that somewhere in space the great cruisers and destroyers clashed in titanic rage. But in the elevator, there was no sound save the hum of the servos and the harsh breathing of two exhausted people. In the elevator, there was no light save the flashing by-lights of the elevator shaft. In the elevator, there was no war, no mission, no fight.

Cassian leaned against the cold metal wall and watched the silent light flash across Jyn’s face, illuminating the green of her eyes before fading back into shadow. Light, green eyes, shadow, light, green, shadow, a comforting rhythm, like a heartbeat or the soft blinking lights of the flight console in hyperspace, light, green, shadow, – except – except –

Something was wrong with her hair. He squinted at it, trying to understand, but the green of her eyes kept distracting him. Grey, he realized, her hair was grey, the dull slate grey of the elevator wall behind her, blending in with the metal, fading into it, the grey seeping down into her skin like poison, dripping down her forehead and soaking into her cheekbones – in a moment it would touch her eyes and the green would fade out too. He opened his mouth to warn her, to call out, anything, but the terror wrapped around his throat and sank its frozen thorns into his skin from the inside out.

Cassian woke up. Grey sheets. Grey light of pre-dawn. Blurry grey reflection of his face in the grey ceiling overhead.

Green light on his datapad.

 

-

 

Subj: RE: Day 12

To: Korr

From: Wyla

Doing fine. This place a fucking tourist trap. People come here for a week vacation and then go back to work and turns out they only missed a day or something. That’s prob why everythings so bloody expensive. Idiot kid tried to take my holo at dinner. Thought I looked keen. His word. Wiped his imager when he walked too close, had a scrubber on hand because I’m prob almost as paranoid as you

Got more red tea from that shop. Not the way I told you. Used credits. Boring, but safer

Stay safe

 

[Delete Message Y/N?]

 

-

 

Cassian realized his fingers were drumming restlessly against the side of the datapad. He closed his eyes, held himself still, then allowed himself to read the message again. _Not the way I told you_ – she meant the casual way she’d described robbing the tea shop (or its customers) in the span of an hour or so, and for a moment, a bare moment, Cassian was there again, walking through the noisy Shift shopping area, scanning the crowd for threats, smelling the rich mixture of tea and people and metal, listening to Jyn’s voice, watching the light catch in her eyes, light, green, shadow –

No. Not going down that womp-rat hole.

Cassian read the message one more time, even smiled a little at the grumpy tone behind _used credits,_ as if Jyn found paying an Imperial shopkeeper personally offensive, then deleted the message.

It was harder to press the ‘delete’ button this time, but to keep the message would be a greater risk than it was worth.

He pushed himself out of bed, shaved in the silver-grey mirror, dressed in the grey uniform, grey jacket, grey cap.

Grey reflection in the walls, moving just in the corner of his eye, level with his head. Cassian closed his eyes, grit his teeth. A loud hum vibrated through his body, the purplish light bleeding through his eyelids, the Archive receiving another data dump from somewhere out in the real-time galaxy. Coruscant, probably. Maybe Hosnian Prime. To the outside world, these dumps were probably being sent every few minutes, and the time dilation on Certh allowed the slaves and officers here to process it faster than anywhere else could. Or rather, it allowed the enormous archives to process it, store it, send it out again as required.

The walls fell silent again, but the hum lingered in his head.

Cassian picked up the datapad, opened a blank message.

 

-

 

Subj: Day 14

To: Wyla

From: Korr

Still here. Secure.

I’m sure you looked very keen. Especially if you stole my jacket again. It’s too big for you, but I have to admit you have good taste.

Nothing to report down here. Work is routine now. I never see the sun here because of my work hours, so they gave me a stronger vitamin pill to cover the deficiency. Are you taking yours up there? Certh’s sun is too weak to support most organic life.

Slept badly last night.

Be safe.

 

-

 

Cassian sighed, hovered his hand over _slept badly last night_ , prepared to delete it. What was _wrong_ with him? He had gone years without any partner at all, and years after that with Kay as his backup, though the droid was often regulated to the ship, somewhere his appearance would not draw untoward attention. Cassian had operated all that time as a mostly autonomous agent, and he had handled it. It hadn’t been…easy, but he had handled it.

But he had a partner for, what was it, four months? And been without her, more or less, for two weeks, and already he was fraying at the edges. Already, he was writing out every random passing thought without regard to the danger of it. Was it Scarif that had done this to him? Or was it only that, for the first time in his adult life (in his whole life, as far as he could recall), he was actually –

Someone pounded on the door, and Cassian instantly jumped back from the door, turning to the window, half prepared to smash through it and run along the thick ledge of the pyramid outside, before his brain kicked in and he remembered that if the enforcers came for him, they would not fucking _knock._ Quickly, he hit “Send” on his datapad and collapsed it into his belt, adjusting his cap and jacket as he strode to the door. Major Aldin Korr. Imperial inspector. Another day in the Archive.

“Morning, Major,” Raeth drawled, leaning slightly against the doorframe, his eyes suspiciously unfocused. Behind him, the Neimoidian slave stood as composed as a senator, and Raeth’s eblerite reflection bobbed and wove, the unsteady movements of Raeth’s head exaggerated when disembodied from his more stable torso.

“Lieutenant,” Cassian replied crisply. He didn’t smell any alcohol or recreational substances, and Raeth’s eyes were unfocused but not blown or bloodshot. Not drunk or drugged, most likely. As Cassian stared at him dispassionately, Raeth seemed to pull upright and into himself, like a puppet tugging all his loose strings tight. Behind him, both the slave and the ghosts were equally still.

“Long night, wasn’t it?” The Lieutenant shrugged, as casual and airy as if nothing of interest at all had happened. “Noisy.”

Cassian wasn’t sure, but it seemed like the Neimoidian’s red eyes shifted from staring at nothing to staring at the Imperial, and his hand flicked again near his pocket. Then again – it might have only been the eblerite reflection playing tricks with Cassian’s eyes.

“I didn’t notice,” he said shortly, and headed for the elevator. Raeth fell in behind him as easily as if they did this every day, and this time seemed in no hurry to offer an explanation or make any conversation. Did he suspect Major Korr? Was this his idea of counter espionage? Was he, perhaps, simply an inexperienced officer who thought he smelled a spy and was now just going to follow him about? Or worse – Raeth might well be a counterintel agent, and he was simply following Cassian because he already knew he could pick him up at any time. Or he was just a sycophantic junior officer hoping to attach himself to a powerful superior in order to beg the favor of a new posting elsewhere.

Or, he eyed Raeth’s composed face, looking for traces of the abstraction that had made him look so _off_ this morning, perhaps the man was simply going mad. Cassian had been on this planet two weeks and jumped at his own reflection. Raeth had been here…longer.

Cassian missed K2SO suddenly. He wished he could have altered Korr’s documents enough to account for a personal security droid, but much to Kay’s annoyance, his model was slowly being phased out. Higher officers in the Imperial Army no longer considered a KX model as a mark of prestige. An Inspector with the kind of clout that Cassian pretended to would certainly not be seen with one.

Much to both Kay and Jyn’s annoyance, he had no excuse to bring her down, either. Which was a good thing – if this place was getting under his skin so much already, he didn’t want to see how jumpy it would make him to have Jyn in the same line of fire. To walk down these halls with all these trailing ghosts and an officer who may or may not suspect him of espionage? To worry constantly that someone would push her too hard or too far or just try to take advantage of a lower ranked female while he was elsewhere?

No, better that she was up on The Shift, stomping around with her heavy synth-leather jacket and war paint, drinking tea and sizing up the security systems. Better that she was close to a ship and a quick exit, if it came to that.

“You look a particularly _reflective_ today, Major,” Raeth suddenly piped up with a little grin as the elevator doors closed them into the small space. He nodded to the dark shape of Cassian’s organic reflection in the grey elevator walls, almost four different refractions in here for each of them, a whole shadowy crowd watching from the murky surfaces. Raeth grinned at his pun and leaned back against one wall, his hands tucked behind his back in a parody of parade rest again. “Doesn’t he, Sachee?”

The Neimoidian did not respond, merely tilted his head slightly to the side as he considered both Humans, and then turned his attention back to the elevator controls. Raeth didn’t seem the least bothered by this dismissal, leaning his head back against the wall and asking the ceiling, “Any interesting thoughts in there? _Sir.”_

Cassian’s mouth thinned, but whether he was suppressing a frown or a laugh, even he wasn’t sure.

_I am not handling this mission as well as I expected, and I don’t know if I’m suffering some residual trauma or if I’m just homesick._

_I keep wishing my partner was here even though I know it would endanger both her and my mission._

_I am so sick of grey I feel physically ill for a few minutes every morning when I open my eyes._

_I can’t decide if you are a spy, a suck up, or just insane._

“You said it was noisy last night,” he said at last. “I’m curious, Lieutenant. What, precisely, did you hear?”

The quiet that settled into the elevator was unnerving, not the least because it reminded Cassian abruptly, painfully, of the muted quality of his nightmare. His throat tightened, but no, no, he was not asleep, there were no thorns inside and no battle outside. Jyn was not here, not fading.

Not Scarif.

The Neimoidian turned his head and regarded Cassian for several silent seconds, and then turned back to the controls of the elevator. Raeth’s eyes had gone unfocused again.

“Just the sounds of efficiency, Major,” Raeth smiled vaguely at him. “The Archive is always awake, you know, always working, humming away even between the Uploads.” He tapped his temple once, twice, and then casually reached back and rapped his knuckle against the wall behind him, right over the blurry reflection of the back of his head. Cassian wondered, briefly, how he’d known exactly where to tap without looking. “You’ll understand when you’ve been here awhile yet, sir.”

“Major Korr is on a temporary assignment,” Sachee said from the corner, and Cassian nearly whirled around to look at him. The slave’s voice was oddly melodic, and higher pitched than he expected. “He will not be among us long, Lieutenant.”

“Ah, of course,” Raeth said absently. “Of course. He is only temporarily dead, no?”

“Lieutenant Raeth,” Cassian said sharply. “Are you drunk?”

“Not at all, sir,” Raeth straightened immediately, his face turning mostly focused, although that damnable little smile still tugged at the corners of his eyes and mouth. “Not a drop since I’ve been down here. Not a sniff or a tipple. Come, sir, it’s only a little joke, common in the barracks and among the junior officers. You passed through The Shift, did you not?” He pointed up to the ceiling just as the elevator chimed and opened to Cassian’s floor. “And now you’re here, down with the ghouls and the ghosts.”

“A common joke,” Sachee echoed smoothly, and Cassian decided to let it drop. What were his options? Turn in the lieutenant and possibly spark an investigation into everything the man had touched? Draw more attention to himself as a reporting officer?

No, so far Cassian had avoided spending any time with other officers on Certh, a distance the regulars here were all too happy to maintain given Major Korr’s task at hand, and it was best if he kept it that way. If he was careful, and lucky, Raeth would wander off again in time.

If he was unlucky…well, he had a blaster hidden under his bunk and a sketchy escape plan in the back of his head. Maybe tomorrow morning he should tell Jyn to be ready for a bug out, just in case. Or maybe he should take a deep breath and not lose his head over an oddball Imperial. Jyn knew the emergency codes, she knew to run if he told her. If he told her about the ramblings of this random officer as if they were a serious threat, she would either think Cassian was losing his grip as well, or she would come down here looking for him.

He didn’t want her to come down here. He didn’t want her to be here.

He didn’t need her to come down, and put herself at risk, because Cassian was struggling on what should have been a relatively easy undercover assignment. ( _Maldito sea_ , no one was even _questioning_ him, he barely ever had to scan his ID or even interact with Imperials, and all the stormtroopers stayed down in the lower levels, where the slaves lived. This mission was practically a vacation compared to some of his other work.)

He didn’t need Jyn to come here. He was fine.

“Your time will be up soon, Major,” Raeth said as he trotted along in Cassian’s wake down the hallway towards his office, and had there been any menace in his voice at all, Cassian might have tried to run right there. But the lieutenant merely sounded cheerful, a little teasing, a lad having a bit of a joke on his boss. “And up you’ll go, back through the Shift gates and to the land of the living, and leave us ghouls down here in our efficient tombs.”

Behind him, Sachee watched them both with steady red eyes and a blank face.

“Good day, Lieutenant,” Cassian said firmly, and stepped into his office, locking the door.

Day fourteen, he reminded himself. Fifty-six to go.

 

* * *

 

[Day 19 / The Certh Imperial Archives]

[Day 2 / The Shift]

[Day 0 / 0728 GST / Galactic Standard Calendar]

 

Attachment: [DAY18_CERTH_FULCRUM_REPORT]

 

[Aryss Archive Server 75204757124D56FU2 Backup Files]

[Scroll Up For More…]

[Strategic: Recently Signed Official Business Contracts (Naboo): [Select Company to Review Details]]

[Personnel: Troop Assignments (Ryloth System): [Select Unit to Review Unit Orders]]

[Inventory: Tactical Weaponry: Ground Unit: Area Effect Weaponry: [Select Unit to Review]]

[Scroll Down For More…]

 

* * *

 

 

Subj: Day 18

To: Wyla

From: Korr

Alive. Secure. The Uploads are starting to feel normal now, although my teeth still hurt during them. I wonder if I would be able to hear them if I were outside, on one of the launchpads, perhaps. I won't find out - there is no reason for me to go out there at any time ~~and early in the morning would look particularly suspicious no I shouldn't write that~~. It would probably sound the same, actually. The whole Archive is part of the computer system, there is no metal surface that doesn't connect somehow to the main processors. Can you see the Uploads from the Shift? ~~Do you look down here and~~  At any rate they make very useful morning alarms, and the evening Uploads are a good way to know when the shifts switch over. I am not bound by any particular schedule except the one I set ~~and so long as that remains stable, no one will question~~

I hope you are sleeping well. ~~I clearly need more myself.~~

Be safe.

 

[Delete Message Y/N?]

 

* * *

 

 

Cassian stood in the elevator and watched the light flash across Jyn’s face, green eyes, red blood, brown hair. Outside, battle raged, people lived and died and fought, machines exploded, cruisers and destroyers clashed. But in the elevator, there was no sound. In the elevator, light flashed. No war, no mission, no fight.

Cassian leaned against the cold metal wall and watched, light, green eyes, shadow, light, green, shadow, a comforting rhythm, like a heartbeat or the soft blinking lights of the flight console in hyperspace, light, green, shadow – except – except –

Something was wrong. Grey, grey seeping down into her skin like poison, dripping down her forehead and soaking into her cheekbones, towards her eyes. He opened his mouth to warn her but the thorns tore his throat open first.

Cassian woke up. Grey sheets. Grey light of pre-dawn. Blurry grey reflection of his face in the grey ceiling overhead.

Green light on his datapad.

 

-

 

Subj: RE: Day 17

To: Korr

From: Wyla

Yes, slept a little last night. Couple hrs btwn your messages, so took a nap. Caught another this morning. Have done long-ops before. My record = 15 standard days w/no more than 3 hrs consecutive sleep. Can make it 3 full stan days without any sleep before start making mistakes. 5 days of naps w/nothing to do in btwn is easy. Stop fussing. You’re prob getting less sleep than me. Relatively.

So no, your messages aren’t keeping me up. If you stop sending them, will have to come down there and kick your arse.

What did you mean about if I remember the last time “that happened?” Last time what happened? Did I miss a message? Doesn’t look like it, but not sure. This weird time thing sucks.

Stay safe.

 

-

 

 _Stop fussing_. Cassian laughed softly under his breath. His last three messages had all commented that he hoped she was sleeping well, which felt distant and professional enough over three days, but since she had received all three within…hm, five hours, it probably felt like he was nagging. On the other hand, he had once seen Jyn refuse to eat for two days simply because she got it in her head that two days of sitting at a desk researching the upcoming operation meant she wasn’t earning her food. That had been an interesting, albeit brief, argument between them.  Cassian had only won by asking if that meant _he_ shouldn’t eat either, since he’d been sitting there with her the whole time. She had glared at him, grabbed the applesauce cup he had set in front of her, and drained the whole thing in one long pull, as if she was downing a beer in a drinking contest. He had tried not to look too smug as she swiped the ration bar and stomped out the door without meeting his eye again, although later she’d tossed the empty wrapper at his head and demanded that he stop working and go eat, since he owed her. He hadn’t quite understood how that worked, but he’d followed her to the galley willingly enough.

Cassian’s featureless reflection hovered in his ceiling, staring down at him in the bed. In the pre-dawn light, it was even less distinct than usual. Cassian opened a blank message and held the datapad up in front of his face to block it out.

 

-

 

Subj: Day 19

To: Wyla

From: Korr

Sorry, I don’t remember what I was talking about when I mentioned “last time this happened.” I deleted all the old messages, so I can’t go back and check. It wasn’t important anyway.

I wish I had something more interesting to say. I don’t do much down here. Get up, work in the Archive, eat, sleep. If I want to shake things up, I eat and then work. If I’m feeling really wild, I eat while I work. You would be amazed at

 

-

 

Cassian threw an arm over his eyes. What was he doing? Babbling in text form, that was what. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut against the headache building behind his eyes. Then he deleted the last paragraph of his message and tried again.

 

-

 

Subj: Day 19

To: Wyla

From: Korr

Sorry, I don’t remember what I was talking about when I mentioned “last time this happened.” I deleted all the old messages, so I can’t go back and check. It wasn’t important anyway.

Nothing to report down here. Situation stable.

Be safe.

 

[Delete Message Y/N?]

 

 -

 

He hit Send and let the datapad fall to his chest. Above him, his disembodied head stared at him until his skin itched with the pressure of his own gaze, and the dark grey of his standard issue sheets felt suddenly heavy and hot around his legs. He kicked the sheets off, and then impulsively yanked his shirt over his head. The reflection above him suddenly materialized a blurry torso and arms, and while seeing half of a body wasn’t a huge improvement over just a head, it was…it was _something_ , at least.

Cassian picked up the datapad and rested it on his chest again. Above him, a rectangular void opened up in the middle of his reflection’s body. It felt oddly appropriate.

He snorted. Now he was just being dramatic. Time to get up.

Shave in the silver-grey mirror, dress in the grey uniform, grey jacket, grey cap.

Grey reflection in the walls, moving just in the corner of his eye, level with his head. Close his eyes, grit his teeth. A loud hum, purplish light bleeding through his eyelids, then silence. Cassian stood by the mirror and waited, his eyes still closed. Right on cue, a pounding knock at the door.

“Morning, Major,” Raeth said cheerfully when it opened. He seemed significantly more alert and put together this morning. Even his reflections in the walls bobbed with more energy than usual. Cassian nodded to both the lieutenant and the Neimoidian slave, and walked without comment toward the elevator. Raeth followed without speaking (for once), but there was a little bounce in his step. Cassian half expected him to whistle.

“Lieutenant,” Cassian asked as they stepped into the elevator and the slave silently pressed the correct floor code. “How long have you been stationed on Certh?”

“Bit of a funny question to ask down here, Major,” Raeth’s grin didn’t so much widen as sharpen around the edges. “Time being, as you know, a bit of a relative bugger.”

Cassian raised his eyebrow at the slang – perhaps Raeth’s lack of decorum accounted for his posting on this admittedly terrible assignment – but the lieutenant merely shrugged and leaned back against the wall of the elevator as it rose (Cassian did not look at the lights flashing across Raeth’s face. He didn’t need to look. It wasn’t an issue. It was just – he didn’t look.) Raeth folded his hands behind his back as if he were at parade rest, but he still leaned against the elevator wall, spoiling any illusion of stiff military discipline. “Sachee hears you’re a math type,” he nodded at the Neimoidian, who gave no indication that he heard at all, standing with much stricter decorum by the elevator door, his great red eyes staring at the controls. “Sachee hears all kinds of things in the lower levels of the Archives. Makes him useful.” Raeth shrugged, his eyes slightly unfocused, then he seemed to snap back. “I have survived through two thousand and fourteen Uploads, sir,” he said in a slightly sing-song voice, eyeing Cassian thoughtfully.

Cassian met his gaze calmly. This was a test, it was obvious, but a test of what? His ability to calculate? No, Cassian decided, noting the careful, almost hopeful way that Raeth was watching him. At the door, even Sachee’s red eyes flicked from the controls to Cassian and back again. No, more likely this was Raeth testing the Inspector’s limits, his willingness to play games.

Two thousand Uploads translated to just shy of three years. Three years of tedious, repetitive office work, of unrelenting grey and buzzing in his bones.

Perhaps he was an obnoxious game-player, but most likely of all…the man was just bored. Terribly, unforgivingly bored.

Cassian had been here slightly more than two _weeks_  and he already understood at least some of that feeling.

“Two point seven five eight years, Certh time scale,” Cassian said, and then fastidiously straightened his wrist cuff. “The standard duty rotation on Certh is one year, Lieutenant.” Cassian glanced up at him from under the brim of his cap. “Who did you piss off?”

Raeth let out a harsh bark of laughter. “Too many people to count, sir. Too many people to count.” The elevator buzzed and the doors hissed open. The Neimoidian stepped off and to the side, waiting for Raeth and Cassian to pass in front and lead the way down the nondescript slate grey corridor. “You get used to it,” Raeth said meditatively, just before they reached Cassian’s office. “Heh. No. That’s a lie. You never get used to _this._ ” He knocked his gloved knuckles against the wall with an offhand thump, tapping over his ghostly reflection. “But it gets into your head anyway,” he went on in an oddly dreamy tone. “Gets in your head until you understand.”

Behind him, Sachee shifted his weight, a slight movement that Cassian may have only imagined. Did the slave just reach up and touch the pocket of his poorly-fitted grey coveralls? The air seemed tense suddenly, and Cassian found himself holding his breath, his attention divided between the too-still Neimoidian and the Imperial lieutenant who swayed slightly as if pushed by some invisible breeze, even here, deep in the metal-and-circuited heart of the Archives. Cassian fought with himself, wanting to probe Raeth ( _Understand? Understand what?_ ) but unwilling to try it in front of the red stare of the Neimoidian. His slave uniform inspired a certain amount of sympathy in Cassian, but not enough to risk his mission.

And then Raeth saluted again, the sloppy, unworried salute he’d given Cassian when he first arrived, and the strange, tense moment passed. “Oh, thought I should warn you, Major,” he rapped the wall again dully. “Today’s a Backup day. Instead of Evening Upload, the Archive will back up all the data from the last…uh,” he squinted down the corridor as if the answer to some difficult question was written on the far wall at the end. “The last _month_ , I guess is the closest word. There’s no moon, right?” He pointed upward vaguely. “No way to track months here. Most of the slaves don’t even know how old they are in years. No months means no years. They just count their age by Backups.” He grinned and patted the Neimoidian’s motionless shoulder as he passed. “Sachee here is, what, two hundred and fifty Backups? In the bloom of his youth, this one, the handsome devil. Anyway, there will be a lot of light and noise, but it’s not a raid or anything. No one raids _Certh_.” Raeth practically sneered the last, and then sauntered off down the hallway, his assistant – his slave – gliding smoothly behind him. “This is the safest place in the galaxy.”

Cassian watched them go, trailing their ghosts. Two hundred and fifty Backups - twenty years old, Cassian thought with a jolt. The Neimoidian was younger than him, but his heavily lined face and rarely-blinking eyes had somehow made Cassian believe him much older. Human bias, he reminded himself with a mental scowl. He knew better than to apply Human visual cues to an alien species – that was Imperial thinking, lazy, careless, insidious. He wondered, briefly, pointlessly, what Jyn would say if he told her. Would she be disappointed in him? Or just worried that he was already showing signs of indoctrination, even after a few mere days (hells, mere _hours_ , from her point of view)?

He went into his office (square, windowless, dark grey, filled with console screens and a grey and blue poster on the otherwise bare walls proclaiming that Efficient Workers Were Patriotic Workers), and locked the door. Two different eblerite reflections bobbed across the walls on either side of his desk as he walked to it, peering over his shoulders. The empty datastick in his pocket felt heavier than usual today as he considered Raeth’s interference – and his information.

A mass data backup was a big deal. He could potentially work his way into the system throughout the morning hours, and be ready to filter through and catch a large quantity of data for the rebellion. He’d never be able to copy the entire backup, of course, the amount of data that went through these enormous pyramid-shaped processors at any given time was beyond a thousand datasticks, but he could still probably grab something of value.

On the other hand…a major backup would have extra safe-guards. Higher risks.

Cassian sat at his desk and put his head in his hands. If it came to it, he had already mapped an escape route up to the launch pads. There was usually a Shift shuttle incoming or outgoing, and they were easy enough to slice and steal. Once through the distortion, he would have at least a few hours before any pursuit or message could get through alerting the Shift Imperials that he was there, time enough to grab Jyn and escape.

If he was lucky, of course.

If he couldn’t get to the launchpad, if he couldn’t get a shuttle, there was always the slave pens in the lower levels. Perhaps he could appeal to them, hope for their aid in hiding from his pursuers. If he was very, very lucky.

If he wasn’t…

Cassian pulled his datapad from his belt and called up the message program, then paused with his fingers hovering over the encrypted icon that would call up his personal message line to Jyn. No, no, he would not write her an ‘if you’re reading this’ message. Not only would it put him (and her) in greater danger when his datapad was confiscated after his capture or death, but…she wouldn’t want it. She didn’t need that kind of burden on her, didn’t need to bear his last words back to the rebellion, certainly didn’t want to know that she was helpless on The Shift while he was dying down here.

Cassian closed the program, and clipped his datapad back to his belt. He would slice into the Backup, but he would make no attempt to steal data. He would use this chance to observe how it worked, how the code streamed through, what kind of information he could reach. Reconnaissance, not acquisition. Next time, next month (next Backup, whatever) he could try for something more ambitious.

The ghosts of his own face winked in and out of his sight, ducking behind the console screens as he leaned forward to avoid them.

Cassian set his shoulders, flipped on his console, and did what he did best – buried himself in his work.

 

* * *

 

Subj: Day 20

To: Wyla

From: Korr

Alive. My head still aches from a major data backup last night, but still alive. The Backup was impressive but painful. The Archive compresses all the data acquired over the course of the ‘month,’ and then sends that copy somewhere deep underground, where the pyramids extend even further than anyone in the upper levels has the security clearance to know. The whole pyramid shook for an hour, everything glowed a sick sort of purple. Metal felt too warm to the touch, and everything is metal here. I ended up standing the whole time, because it involved the least amount of touching anything. Every Backup, significant data streams throughout the whole Archive. I will be better prepped for it next time, in 30 days. The Backup is apparently the only way to mark increments of time without a chrono. ~~LT Raeth says the chronos all lie anyway and~~

Everything here is grey. Even my sheets. Even the food. I am beginning to wonder: if I went colorblind, how would I know?

Be safe. ~~I need you to be~~

[Delete Message Y/N?]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I meant for this to be a little disorienting, given the difference between time flows and the mental effect a place like Certh would have on, well, anyone, especially someone who has only recently gone through some pretty traumatic events. But I don't want it to be completely confusing or unreadable. Please let me know if it is. (And yes, there will be more Jyn, later).
> 
> Also, I did the math for this to the best of my ability. As a reminder, 14 hours for Cassian = 1 hour for Jyn (on the Shift), 1 hour in real-time space = ~5.5 days on Certh (and Certh has 20 hours/day, The Shift has 22 hours/day, and real-time space = 24 hours/day). If you catch any math errors, first of all kudos to you for being a super careful reader, and second, tell me and we can be nerds about it together.


	3. heard your voice through a photograph

* * *

 

[Day 33 / The Certh Imperial Archives]

[Day 3 / The Shift]

[Day 0 / 0916 GST / Galactic Standard Calendar]

* * *

Cassian stood in the elevator and watched Jyn’s face. Green eyes, red blood, brown hair. Outside, battle raged, people lived and died, machines exploded, ships clashed. In the elevator, there was no sound. In the elevator, light flashed.

Cold metal wall against Cassian’s shoulder, muted pain throughout his body, light, green eyes, shadow, light, green, shadow, a heartbeat, a flight console, light, green, shadow – except – except –

Grey seeping down into her skin like poison, dripping down her forehead and soaking into her cheekbones, hollowing her eyes. He opened his mouth but the thorns tore his throat open.

Cassian woke up. Grey sheets. Grey light. Grey reflection of his face in the grey ceiling.

Green light on his datapad.

 -

 Subj: RE: Day 31

To: Korr

From: Wyla

I saw you were thinking about expanding your responsibilities down there, maybe doing some extra inspection work. Thoroughness in your efforts is good. Overextending yourself is not. Relax, Major, you don’t have to do everything yourself. Leave something for the next Inspector to do.

I had a shitty dream too. Someone I cared about fell and didn’t come back up. It’s just the messed up schedule. When this contract is over, I’m going to sleep for a week. Sounds like you should too.

Stay safe.

 

[Delete Message Y/N?]

-

Cassian read the message twice, then once more but in Jyn’s voice, as best as he could imagine it. He fiddled with the datapad’s settings, changing the white letters on the dark grey background to a pink so bright it almost hurt his eyes, then to orange, then to bright blue, and then he read it again. He highlighted a few random words and phrases just so he could mess around with the yellow highlighter tool; _I saw you, everything yourself, I care about, sleep for a week, sounds like you._

His bare chest was cold; the temperature in the Archive pyramid was by necessity kept lower than Humans generally found comfortable, because colder temperatures improved the efficiency of the circuits in the walls. Cassian grit his teeth and ignored the way his skin pebbled as he lay there, staring at the datapad screen. He had found in the last few days that he preferred waking up to see at least half of his body in the ceiling, rather than just his decapitated head. The cold was worth it. Still, Cassian held the datapad up in front of his face anyway, blocking the disturbing view.

 _I saw you were thinking about expanding your responsibilities down there._ Cassian huffed a slightly sour laugh, because of course she had him figured out. Jyn knew he was planning to slice into the next Backup, something he was damn sure he had not mentioned in his personal messages to her. His correspondence to her, that was. His professional-courtesy  I’m-still-alive notifications to her. So if she knew about his attempts to go above and beyond mission parameters, then she was reading his nightly data reports too, or at least the parts where he wrote out what little context or analysis he had time to attach along with the reams of stolen information.

She was reading his reports? That seemed…dull. Horribly dull. He could barely stand to write them. Why was she doing that? Even the Analysis department wouldn’t have had time to read all his reports yet (and that was a thought that made his head fucking hurt, because he’d been here almost a solid month and it was still _breakfast time_ back at Command.] But Jyn was reading his reports and, of course, arguing with him about it. _You don’t have to do everything yourself,_ as if that had ever been true in his life, as if it was true now when he was trapped alone in an Imperial hellhole –

A glimpse of dark eyes staring at him from an indistinct face – he’d let the datapad drop while he was whining to himself in his head, and his reflection was watching him over the top of the ‘pad. Cassian glared at it and raised the screen again, flipping the color controls until the words turned bright green.

 _I had a shitty dream too_.

Had he mentioned his dreams in his last letter? No, not letter, message. _Correspondence_.

He couldn’t check, he’d deleted it. He deleted everything. Safer that way. Nothing to link him to the Alliance. Nothing to link him to Jyn. He was severed of all links here, which was -

Damn, had he told her what he was dreaming? No, no, he hadn’t, he was sure of that. He’d just told her he’d slept poorly and had bad dreams. He wasn’t the type to talk about that sort of thing, and if anyone ever somehow dug through and decrypted his message traffic…well, he’d have a lot more to answer for than troubling dreams of towers and elevators and green eyes fading into oblivion, wouldn’t he? But anyway, he hadn’t told her what he dreamed. Cassian read over the last paragraph again and raked a hand through his hair. He hadn’t told her; he wasn’t brave like her.

_Someone I cared about fell._

He needed to get up. The Upload would happen soon. Cassian’s flesh-and-blood shadow would arrive, trailing a Neimoidian slave and a host of less corporeal people in his wake. Cassian glanced at the datapad one more time, then forced his suddenly heavy hand to tap the ‘delete’ key. The colorful message vanished, leaving only the blank grey screen behind.

He flipped the word color settings back to white, and opened a new message window. He sat up to type, and ignored the half-man in the walls who rose up with him.

-

Subj: Day 33

To: Wyla

From: Korr

Alive. Appreciate your concern, but I have a duty and I will execute it.

I hope you are holding up well.

Be safe.

 -

Cassian frowned, read the message again. It sounded wrong somehow, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on why. Had he said something dangerous? There was nothing incriminating, nothing inappropriate. It just sounded strange, sounded like…

It sounded like Major Aldin Korr, speaking to a hired hand.

Cassian closed his eyes and pulled up his knees, resting his forehead on them and breathing hard through his nose. Then he sat up briskly, deleted the message, and started again. Then again. Then again. A glance at the chrono in the corner warned him that he had about ten minutes until Upload. Briefly, he considered just not sending a message today. One day would hardly make a difference, when to Jyn it would only be a matter of an hour and a half silence. She would barely notice.

 _Someone I cared about fell_.

He would notice, if it were the other way around.

Seven minutes to Upload.

-

Subj: Day 33

To: Wyla

From: Korr

You must be terribly bored if you are still reading all of my messages at this point. I will take care not to overwork, but you know me, I hate to miss any opportunities. In the meantime, I hope you get some rest and enjoy your paid vacation up there. No need to worry about your hire, I will be back onboard with your full fee within a few days. We will have plenty of time to sleep then.

Be safe.

 

[Delete Message Y/N?]

-

It was only after he hit ‘send’ and pushed himself to his feet that Cassian wondered if that last sentence might have been implying more than he meant.

Or perhaps, _revealing_ more than he meant.

The red ‘sending’ light on his datapad flashed – it was too late to delete and try again. Jyn would understand what he was trying to say with the rest, and she’d probably write that last line off as a bland agreement with her own statement. Probably. Unless she understood more than he was ready to admit. She always seemed to understand more than he was ready to admit. But he couldn’t gauge her reaction; would she be….alright with it? Or would she just think he was cracking.

This was not a good time to think about it.

Shave in the silver-grey mirror, dress in the grey uniform, grey jacket, grey cap. The material rasped against his chilled skin harsher than ever – but then, it had been weeks since anything except this material had touched his skin. Sensitivity was normal when he was running lone Imperial ops like this.

Mostly lone op, this time. He had to remember the _mostly_. Somewhere far overhead, Jyn burned across the sky like a comet, and sooner or later he would get back up there with her and leave the coarse grey jacket behind.

Grey reflections in the walls, moving just in the corner of his eye, level with his head. Cassian closed his eyes, grit his teeth. A loud hum, purplish light bleeding through his eyelids, silence.

Right on cue, a pounding knock at the door.

 _Major Aldin Korr_ , Cassian thought idly, but it felt less like slipping on a mask as just…brushing lint off his sleeve.

How long before he had to start reminding himself of _Captain Cassian Andor?_

“Morning, Major,” Raeth drawled, his eyes glassy but his posture more or less alert. Behind him, the Neimoidian slave watched impassively, his hands behind his back in rigid attention.  When Cassian turned his head, he could just see the red-eyed reflection peering over his shoulder from the wall behind him. Raeth’s reflections bobbed and danced around him as he stepped back and adjusted his cap at an angle that was only _just_ within Imperial regulations. His sly grin told Cassian that the young officer was waiting for his superior to comment on the cap, probably prepped to spout off the exact regulation that showed he was technically within his rights.

Cassian looked pointedly at the cap, then turned to walk down the hall without a word. In the blurry reflections, he thought he could make out Raeth’s exaggerated disappointed pout. When the lieutenant caught up to him a moment later, however, there was no trace of anything but bland gentility in his face. “Ready for another exciting day regulating data streams, sir?”

“As always, Lieutenant,” Cassian replied, stepping into the elevator and allowing himself just a brief moment to close his eyes against the ghosts that sprang to existence in the metal walls around him.

“Routine can be a comfort, sir,” Sachee said gravely, and Cassian met the slave’s eyes, his own face as shuttered as he could make it.

“In it’s way,” he replied, and the Neimoidian nodded before hitting the floor code that would take them to their offices.

“On the other hand,” Raeth said cheerfully, staring up at the ceiling of the lift, his lackluster smile turned vague and unsettling, “They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over and over-”

“Indeed, sir,” the Neimoidian cut him off flatly, and this time when Cassian made eye contact, he could swear the slave looked…damn, what did it mean in Neimoidian body language when their eyes went wide like that? In a Human, it could mean fear or surprise or even rage. But there were no Neimoidians in the rebellion (not that Cassian had ever met, at least), and precious few of them out in the galaxy after the Empire had begun encouraging the rumors that Neimoidians were disease-bearers. So he had no context for that expression. He looked away, but he could still feel Sachee watching him. “However,” the slave continued in the silence of the elevator, “We prefer to merely be efficient.”

“Ah,” Raeth replied dreamily. “Don’t we just, Sachee? Don’t we _just?_ ”

Cassian’s spine was so rigid it ached, but he kept his face impassive as he stared straight ahead. What was this? A test? A trap?

The elevator doors opened, and he marched out into the corridor, the slave and the (possibly mad) Imperial drifting behind.

“See you tomorrow, Major,” Raeth called just before Cassian slipped into his office and locked the door. The lieutenant’s voice seeped through the thick door like an echo. “And tomorrow. And tomorrow.”

* * *

 

[Day 40 / The Certh Imperial Archives]

[Day 3 / The Shift]

[Day 0 / 1057 GST / Galactic Standard Calendar]

 

* * *

Subj: Day 39

To: Wyla

From: Korr

Are you enjoying your time on The Shift? Have you found time to get some solid rest? I would strongly dislike coming back to a tired pilot. Very inefficient, and you know how I feel about efficiency. Everything on Certh so far is very efficient. I still have some places I would like to spot-check, and much work yet to do, but I am at least impressed with the Empire’s ingenuity in this place. My report to ~~Command~~ my commander may be favorable after all.

Who is Sovi? You mentioned in your last message that Sovi liked the tea you brought him, but I don’t recall if you told me who that is. I am glad you have made a friend on The Shift. I am mostly isolated from the other officers, largely because no one wants to look like they are toadying up to an Inspector. Or possibly they just don’t want to draw my attention to their division. ~~There is a noticeable exception to this rule who keeps coming to my door~~ I have officially reached the halfway point of this ~~operati~~ assignment, however, and have no need to interact with any of them beyond the occasional query via netmail.

Be safe.

 

[Delete Message Y/N?]

-

Cassian stood in the elevator and watched Jyn. Green eyes, red blood, brown hair. Outside, battle raged. In the elevator, no sound. In the elevator, light flashed.

In the elevator, ghostly faces drifted behind Jyn’s shoulders, silent, indistinct, watching.

Cold metal wall against Cassian’s shoulder, muted pain in his body, but it in her face there was peace, light, green eyes, shadow, light, green, shadow, a heartbeat, light, green, shadow – except – except –

Grey poisoned her skin, dripped down her face, hollowed her eyes. He opened his mouth but the ghosts reached out from the walls and tore his throat open.

Cassian woke up. Grey sheets. Grey light. Grey reflection in the grey ceiling.

Green light on his datapad.

-

Subj: RE: Day 38

To: Korr

From: Wyla

Yes, I got more of the tea. It’s really good, and it makes the shuttle smell like fruit. Think it’s a fruit. Had it years ago. Smells nice. If you’re not a total assbag when you get back here, I’ll even share it with you. And if you aren’t too exhausted from all the extra work you are still doing or planning to do down there, I’ll let you have some of the noodles I’ve picked up, too. They are a little spicy though, don’t know if you can handle them. Don’t overwork yourself and I guess we’ll see.

Yes, I’m still reading _all_ your messages, and I can tell you’re still thinking of taking on extra responsibilities. If you think it will get you ahead in promotion, you’re probably wrong. Just do your job and take a break from time to time. Your family will be pissed off if you burn out down there, and I don’t want to take the heat for letting it happen.

Stay safe.

 

[Delete Message Y/N?]

-

Cassian changed the text to green and read it again. She was still reading all his reports as well as his personal messages. She knew he was still planning to intercept the Backup. And she still, of course, disapproved.  She had told him some variation of ‘take it easy,’ her code for ‘don’t do something dangerous,’ in every message for the past two weeks. Which from her point of view, meant every hour and a half, she was coming up with a new way to tell him she was worried about him.

But she was up there and he was down here. And the Backup was a data mine he couldn’t pass up. If he could get approval from Command first, he would. But there was no time out in real-space to make that call.

There was too much time down here to avoid making it.

 _Your family will be pissed off if you burn out_. So she was sticking with the “family retainer” story, good. It allowed a certain kind of familiarity in their messages, and he was starting to enjoy that part of their correspondence. (If he was being honest, he was long past _starting_.) ‘His family’ was probably meant to sound like she was talking about his fabricated Imperial family, but he wondered what she _really_ meant by it. Command? Rebel Intelligence leadership?

Chirrut, Baze, Bodhi, and Kay?

Herself?

Cassian ran a finger over the words _your family_ , highlighting them in yellow. The yellow clashed with the green text, so Cassian spent a few minutes fiddling with the color controls until the words were orange and the highlighter was bright blue. The contrast hurt his eyes, though, so he shifted the text back to green and wiped the highlighter away. He was wasting time, anyway. He needed to get up.

-

Subj: Day ~~41~~ 40

To: Wyla

From: Korr

My family will understand, I hope, when I complete my assignment with distinction. ~~I know my limits~~ I am grateful for the concern, but I have every intention of earning those noodles when I come back. Although I am mildly offended at the insinuation that I would not handle spice well. In fact, I would bet that if I adjusted the recipe to my own tastes, you might have trouble keeping up. ~~I haven’t cooked much in awhile, so it might be nice to~~

The noise of the Archives makes it difficult to sleep well lately, so I hope you will forgive me any confusion in these messages. It’s getting harder to keep track of the time differential in my head.

Be safe.

 

[Delete Message Y/N?]

-

It was getting harder to translate the time in his head, which worried him a little, but then, who could think when ghostly faces watched him from the walls, which were always glowing and humming as Imperial census reports and economic data and secrets whispering through them all day?

Cassian got up, ignoring the half-body in the walls that mirrored his movements, ignoring the prickle of the cold in his bare skin.

Shave in the silver-grey mirror, dress in the coarse grey uniform, scratchy grey jacket, grey cap rough against his fingertips. For a moment, just a moment, he imagined it was someone else’s fingertips catching on the cloth, some other man who did not care if the grey material scraped his skin clean off his bones and left him only a grey skeleton in this fitting tomb.

No. No, that was dangerous. But once the thought was in his head, it was hard to erase. He could almost imagine this other man’s life, Aldin Korr, son of a reasonably wealthy business man who knew the only way up in the galaxy was through the efficient use of his time in the Imperial military. Cassian stood behind Aldin and watched him rub his hands over the stiff material of the starched officer’s cap, watched his neatly trimmed fingernails catch in the weave as it scraped, scraped, scraped at the sensitive skin.

 _Your family will be pissed off if you burn out_. His family wasn’t on some Mid Rim planet building a modest merchant empire. His family was on stolen cruiser in the middle of black space, still healing from some of the nastier injuries they had sustained on Scarif. His family was in a U-Wing orbiting this hellhole of a planet.

Cassian stretched his hand out irritably, rubbing his stinging hand against his face, and set the cap neatly on his head.

Grey reflections in the walls, moving just in the corner of his eye, level with his head. Cassian closed his eyes, grit his teeth. A loud hum, purplish light bleeding through his eyelids, silence.

Right on cue, a pounding knock at the door.

“Morning, Major.”

Raeth, grinning, his skin looking somewhat clammy today. Over his shoulder, ghosts in the walls and watchful red eyes.

“Another exciting day, Lieutenant,” Cassian said as he walked towards the elevator, and ignored the short, chattering laugh behind him.

* * *

 

[Day 49 / The Certh Imperial Archives]

[Day 3 / The Shift]

[Day 0 / 1323 GST / Galactic Standard Calendar]

 

* * *

Cassian stood in the elevator with Jyn. Her green eyes seared into his skin, red blood pooled on her collar, brown hair floating across her cheek whisper soft. There was no sound. Light flashed.

Ghostly faces drifted behind Jyn’s shoulders, silent, their eyes grey as the metal in the walls, and when he looked away from Jyn he saw them watching, Tivik, Naerdia, Galen Erso – so many faces watching him. He looked away, looked at Jyn, chose to burn in the green fire rather than drown in the grey silence.

Cold metal wall against Cassian’s shoulder, muted pain in his body, but it in her face there was peace, light, green eyes, shadow, light, green, shadow, a heartbeat, light, green, shadow – except – except –

Grey poisoned her, the light dying and turning cold and empty as the walls of the elevator. He opened his mouth but Galen Erso reached out from the walls and tore his throat open.

Cassian woke up. Grey sheets. Grey light. Grey reflection of a featureless grey man in the grey ceiling.

Green light on his datapad.

-

Subj: RE: Day 47

To: Korr

From: Wyla

There was a street show of some kind in the lower decks of the shopping area. Some kids dancing a routine, doing jumps and flips and stuff. They weren’t bad, but saw 3 more kids with credit-chip scanners in the crowd. Clever little shits. They got a bunch of credits from the watchers, and the sticky-fingers got a lot more, I bet. It’s a low-end operation, but not bad for a bunch of kids. The performers were all non-Human, the sticky-fingers all Human. Also smart. Human kids will get misdemeanors if caught, the Rodian kid would have gotten hard time. A good show, but getting a bit tired of this place. Only so much kriffing tea you can drink in a day.

Speaking of tea, been bribing the hangar crews at the Inner Ring with the stuff, trying to find out which hangar slot you’ll come in when you’re done being the most efficient inspector ever. That should make your return and pickup so much more efficient. It’s all very efficient. I know you love efficiency. For the record, Mirialan-Wookiee dictionary defines ‘efficiency’ as ‘achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.’ Last I checked, that doesn’t mean ‘do everything no matter what in the name of getting a lot of stuff done.’ So maybe stop working yourself so hard. Maybe take a break today. This should get to you by Day 49, right? Perfect time to relax. Eat too much at meal. Go to bed early. Spend some time watching porn on the holonet. Do you get the holonet down there? Forgot to ask. I’ll be in trouble if you fry yourself like on that last gig I had to escort you to. Your mum never let me live it down. So relax, for my sake.

Stay safe.

 

[Delete Message Y/N?]

-

The Backup was today. He had been careful to refrain from mentioning it in the last three reports he sent up, hoping that perhaps the span of several hours combined with her exhaustion would throw her off (she had to be getting tired, three days with only short naps?). But he should have known better; Jyn Erso did not let things drop, not when they mattered to her.

Which meant he mattered to her.

Well, of course he did. _I’ll be in trouble if you fry,_ but even as Cassian thought it, he knew he was lying to himself. Of course Jyn cared. She had been left behind all her life, and now he was threatening to leave her behind by dying on this far away planet where time passed so quickly relative to her. She wouldn’t even know what had happened to him for hours up there, which could be weeks down here. She wouldn’t know he was gone until long after it happened.

The cold of his room bit into his bare skin, but Cassian stayed still on the bed and read her message again, flipping the text through a myriad of colors, highlighting phrases, picking apart her words. _Clever little shits_ – Jyn _would_ love a bunch of thieving kids robbing the higher-class Imperials who came to tourist around The Shift. He’s a little surprised she didn’t offer them tips. Maybe she did. He smiled a bit at that thought, imagining Jyn’s sharp-edged grin as she grabbed some scruffy kid by the ear and told them how to thieve better. _Take a break today, go to bed early, look at porn_ – his smile widened until he could actually feel it tugging at the muscles in his face, stretching out his cheeks and jaw. It felt almost unnatural, twisting his stiff face into an expression he hadn’t made in weeks. It felt…good.

Cassian’s chest suddenly felt hollow, his skin itched with the unnamed need for…for…something. _Cuánto tiempo ha pasado desde que te he visto…?_

He swallowed, closed his eyes tight and took a deep breath, let it go. Lifted the datapad back up to block the image of his naked body reflecting in the ceiling. It was better than the decapitated head, better than the half-body image he’d dealt with for a few weeks, but still, he would rather see nothing up there at all.

 _Your mum_ – that must mean Mothma, although the mental work it took him to connect fair, fragile-looking Mon Mothma with the faint memories he had of a powerful, dark haired woman who laughed in the warm light of his long-burned home was exhausting. Cassian highlighted _stay safe_ in hot pink, just to see something different, then closed out the message.

In disgust, he immediately opened it again, and deleted it this time. _Sloppy, Andor. Captain Cassian Andor._

-

Subj: Day 49

To: Wyla

From: Korr

 

 

 

 

-

This might be the last message he send would send her. Cassian stared at the blinking cursor for a long moment, then began to type. In the corner of his eye, the man in the wall next to him moved with stilted, uncertain movements, hunched over his own empty hands and tapping timidly at the air between them.

-

Subj: Day 49

To: Wyla

From: Korr

It’s another day down here on Certh, and I

 

-

If he was caught today, this message would not reach her for another hour or so. Hour in her time, of course, which would be roughly fourteen hours for him. The Backup went during Evening Upload time, roughly seven hours from now. This message would reach her seven hours after he either succeeded at the intercept…or didn’t.

-

Subj: Day 49

To: Wyla

From: Korr

I know that you worry I am over extending myself, but I assure you

 

-

He couldn’t even leave a timed-trigger message, set to go off and warn her if he didn’t stop it in time. The first thing the security forces would look for was his personal datapad. The first thing they would find would be any pending correspondence. They would find Jyn before his warning could get to her.

-

Subj: Day 49

To: Wyla

From: Korr

I hope that tomorrow I will have something interesting to tell you, but today I am

 

-

If he vanished on her, if she followed protocol and returned to the Alliance without him after her five days were up, this would be the last message she took back with her. Not just his last words to Jyn, but to the rebellion.

-

Subj: Day 49

To: Wyla

From: Korr

 

 

 

-

No, Jyn wouldn’t share this with the rebellion unless he specifically asked her to. She would keep it for herself, either scarf to warm her in the coming fight, or a noose to strangle her, depending on what he wrote. Depending on what he said.

What could he say?

-

Subj: Day 49

To: Wyla

From: Korr

~~I’m sorry if this is the last~~

~~I wanted to tell you, just in case, how much of an inspiration you have~~

~~I’ve added a layer of encryption to this letter so that I can risk telling you that I~~

Please forgive me

 

-

Cassian set the datapad on the bed beside his hip, the grey metal of the ‘pad ice cold against his skin. He propped his elbows on his drawn up knees and buried his face in his hands, blocking out the view of the reflection next to him, though he knew the ghost moved in sync with him, all the same. He sat still, breathing in, breathing out, listening to the hum of the Archive walls as they whispered their secrets. The Morning Upload would be soon. He needed to get up, get dressed, remember who he was.

He needed to send this message to Jyn. If it wasn’t his last, she would need the reassurance that he was still here. If it was, she would need…more.

-

Subj: Day 49

To: Wyla

From: Korr

I have a very busy day ahead of me. I would, however, like to thank you for all your concern, and for doing your best to keep an eye on me. It was not a simple task entrusted to you, I know, but please do not worry that you have failed in it. My actions are mine alone. My family will understand that. Please keep to your protocols, and remember that despite our history, I am only another hire, in the end.

I will write again at the appointed time.

Be safe.

 

[Delete Message Y/N?]

-

It wasn’t enough, it wasn’t near enough, but it was all he could think to say that wasn’t blatantly truthful, dangerously honest. Cassian hit ‘send’ before he could rethink it, watched the little red light blink - _message sent, receipt unknown_ \- and got up to get dressed.

Shave in the silver-grey mirror, dress in the restrictive, coarse grey uniform, the unrelentingly scratchy grey jacket, the grey cap painful and rough against his fingertips. His skin itched all over, cold and bare and longing for something he never had anyway.

Grey reflections in the walls, moving just in the corner of his eye, level with his head. Cassian closed his eyes, grit his teeth. A loud hum, purplish light bleeding through his eyelids, silence.

Right on cue, a pounding knock at the door.

“Morning, Major,” Raeth stood still as a statue on the other side of the door, his grin fixed. Sachee watched with equally rigid precision behind him. “Exciting day in the Archives today,” the lieutenant said in his brittle, cheerful voice, the way he always sounded after a “noisy” night. Cassian glanced at Sachee, but there was no hint of recognition or concern in the slave’s face. If Sachee knew that Cassian knew Raeth was having one of his bad days, he gave no sign.

Well, what did a slave care if his master was screwed up in the head?

Unless, of course, this was all an act, and Raeth was just waiting for Cassian to misstep before turning him in to security. Playing his crazy little games and bidding his time.

Cassian strode down the hall toward the elevator. “Is it, Lieutenant?”

“Oh yes, sir,” Raeth said in his wake, Sachee close at his heels, and Cassian bit down on the inside of his cheek to stop himself from imagining Raeth shoving a knife into his spine. “Today’s the day we’ve been waiting for.”

Cassian hummed noncommittally and stepped to the side in the elevator. (The ghosts in the wall watched, multiplying as the Imperial and the Neimoidian entered. The one closest to Raeth did not look like Galen Erso, it did _not,_ but Cassian turned his face away all the same).

 _The day we’ve been waiting for_.

“It’s Backup day!” Raeth laughed, a loud ringing sound that he cut off abruptly. “Sachee is two hundred and fifty one Backups today, sir,” he continued in a jarringly sober voice. “Wish him a happy Life day.”

Cassian met the red eyes of the slave, and inclined his head. The Neimoidian nodded back, and then turned to the elevator controls without further comment.

They rode the rest of the way without comment, even Raeth merely rocking slowly back and forth on his heels but making no sound.

He could still avoid it. He could sit in his office and review charts while covertly copying various low-visibility reports on his empty datastick, and let the Backup pass him by. He would be gone before the next Backup, safely back in real-time space with Jyn. He could just…relax.

But the kind of data he could collect from this Backup would be a massive boon for Intel, for the Alliance, for the entire rebellion. On other missions, Cassian would have killed for a fraction of information with this kind of integrity, information that he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was real and important, straight from the Empire’s own records. He _had_ killed for information this good, in much smaller quantities.

The elevator dinged and the doors opened.

 _I would, however, like to thank you for all your concern, and for doing your best to keep an eye on me_. What a weak way to tell her that having someone care about his safety changed the landscape of his whole world. He’d also said _please do not worry that you have failed_ and _my actions are mine alone,_ and he could only hope that she understood how much he really meant that, could only pray she would not take any of this onto her own shoulders.

“Major,” Raeth said when they neared Cassian’s office, though he drew the word out oddly, _Maaaaaaaaaaaaajor_ , as if he were making some private joke about it, as if he were laughing under the word. Cassian threw him a brief, impassive glance, but Raeth wasn’t looking at him at all, he was staring at one of Sachee’s reflections in the wall. Cassian knew it was Sachee’s reflection, because the indistinct head turned, and he saw the red eyes watching from the metal walls.

“Lieutenant,” Cassian snapped shortly, and walked stiffly into his office. The door snapped shut behind him, and his reflection peered at him through the network of circuits faintly visible in the metal.

He could still back out, let the Backup go by without interference.

Cassian leaned forward and pressed his forehead against the door, against his reflection in the metal. He allowed himself to close his eyes, allowed himself to imagine, for only a brief and breathless moment, that it was Jyn’s forehead against his skin, her breath on his cheek, her green eyes watching him.

He looked up, and there was only grey.

He couldn’t let the Backup pass. It was too good of an opportunity.

Which meant he had about seven hours to prep his slicing code, and wait.

-

The walls glowed purple, and radiated heat. It wasn’t enough to burn his skin if he touched it, but it was uncomfortable, like touching the hood of a speeder after a long ride through a warm environment. Sweat dripped down his back and made the already uncomfortable uniform pinch and itch more than usual. Cassian scrubbed a gloved hand across his damp face and rolled his shoulders as he stared at his screen. The low rumble of the pyramid around him as the Archive processed and filed entire planets’ worth of data hurt his head, and he already knew he would lie awake for hours tonight nursing the headache it left. Just like last time.

Unlike last time, though, his screen was alive with code lines streaming, sorting, and – in tiny, careful increments – copying themselves onto the three small datasticks he had jury-rigged into the single-access point console. It almost made him physically ill to see how much excellent, possibly vital data he was having to let slip by simply because there was no way he could capture it all on a few pocket-sized data storage units. But if he could get even some of this to the Alliance, it will have been worth everything, every second he spent in this pyramid built on slaves and ghosts and terrible grey nightmares.

The file size markers on the datasticks were almost full. The Backup was only going to run another two minutes or so. None of his safeguards to watch-dog programs had noted a single blip in the security grid, his hack of the security cameras on his own floor showed no stormtroopers marching up to his level. All he had to do now was disengage from the system, get the datasticks back to his quarters, and send them through to Jyn.

He was almost there.

The first datastick flashed Drive Full in small, neat red letters. Cassian yanked it from the console and tucked it into his left boot. The purple glow in the wall circuits was beginning to fade – where before it had been so bright that he could only see a uniform haze of purple, now he could see the tiny patterns of the circuits themselves, like veins embedded in the walls, data streaming through the Archive like blood in a living creature. The sensation that Cassian had somehow snuck into the guts of some monster overwhelmed him for a moment, and he could almost imagine a steady throb in the rumble of the Backup, like a distant heartbeat.

The second datastick flashed, Drive Full. Into his right boot, and he was so close now. The purple was fading further, only a few streams of purple light darting crazily through the intricate patterns in the walls, his blurred reflections visible again as the metal cooled and grey seeped back into his world like ink in water, like poison seeping across Jyn’s skin in the elevator that –

Cassian closed his eyes and shook his aching head, hard. Not now. Not _now._ He could not afford to

The door was open.

Cassian’s eyes flew open just in time to register three things at exactly the same time:

Red letters on the last datastick, Drive Full.

Supposedly locked office door, wide open.

Imperial officer, between him and the only escape route.

“Major,” Lieutenant Raeth grinned, drawing out the word oddly, _Maaaaaaaaaaajor_. In his hand, a small grey device blinked red, a personal alert. The kind that Imperial officers liked to put on their personal consoles, to warn them if someone accessed their network without permission.

And Cassian understood.

He was moving before he had time to really think, sprinting across the small, square space and dropping his shoulder right before he drove it directly into Raeth’s solar plexus. The Imperial staggered back, gasping and flailing, and Cassian drove them both across the narrow hall and slammed the man into the wall. The purple was gone now, only grey metal and the struggling ghosts around them.

Cassian pinned his forearm across Raeth’s throat, his other hand twisting his wrist into a painful lock. He turned his hips to the side to avoid a knee in the groin and grunted as Raeth’s blow hit his thigh instead. But Raeth’s struggles were wild, uncoordinated, and surprisingly weak – he probably had a few weeks of hand to hand combat in boot camp years ago. Against Cassian, who had been trained to kill as cleanly and efficiently as possible and used his skills more often than he liked to admit, Raeth was no match. Cassian had him pinned and helpless in a heartbeat, and was already mentally running through possible dumping spots, the ledges of the pyramids were lightly patrolled, if he could just get the Imperial through the halls to a window and then make his way to the shuttle launch pads and then….and then…

Raeth was grinning at him.

Why the fuck was Raeth grinning at him?

“Hello to you, too, Major,” he wheezed, his teeth gleaming in the grey light. His pale eyes flicked over Cassian’s shoulder (grey, how had he not noticed that Raeth’s eyes were grey before?), and that was all the warning Cassian got before something cold and sharp slipped against his throat and pressed delicately over his carotid artery.

In the walls, red eyes gleamed.

“You have made a mistake, sir,” Sachee said in his surprisingly high voice. “And now I must ask that you release Marion Raeth. Slowly.”

Cassian’s heart, already beating so damn fast, kicked in his chest and he felt sick, so sick, it had gone wrong and he was lost, _Jyn, Jyn, I’m so sorry._

The knife moved slightly, he felt a faint sting and then a trickle of warmth running down his neck. “Now, sir,” Sachee said, the warning hiss of a sheecas-snake preparing to strike under his deadly calm tone.

Cassian pulled his arm back from Raeth’s throat and dropped his grip, stepping back from the Imperial with exaggerated care. He lifted his hands to show they were empty (to bring them closer to his collar, where his last escape route waited, tucked under his lapel).

“I must insist that we return to your office, sir,” Sachee said from behind him (and now Cassian could not see him, even in the walls, there was only his own head and Raeth and the dancing, frightened reflections of their grey faces.) “You will, of course, have swept it for listening devices.”

“Better do as he says, Major,” Raeth’s vague smile had returned, his eyes glassy, like he was listening to someone tell a good joke in an invisible earpiece. “Sachee hears things,” he added, as if this somehow explained everything.

“The camera override I installed will run out shortly,” the Neimoidian said quietly, “and other eyes will be able to see us out here in the hallway.”

Camera override? That explained why stormtroopers weren’t already surrounding them, but why had Sachee installed them in the first place?

Cassian walked back into his office, the blade still cold against his throat and never wavering. He could only just hear the soft shuffle of the slave’s feet, but Raeth clattered behind them like a marionette with half it’s strings cut, the Imperial slapping the door closed behind him and then half-collapsing against it. Worse, he seemed to be humming under his breath, a disjointed little tune that crawled up Cassian’s slick spine and chilled the sweat still cooling there on his skin.

“You have come late, sir,” Sachee told him from somewhere behind his shoulder.

And then, abruptly, the knife was gone from his neck.

Cassian spun on his heel and backed away to the far wall, but Sachee had his hands folded behind his back again, his red eyes boring into Cassian and his posture ramrod straight. Raeth leaned against the grey door, his arms hugging his chest as he stared dreamily into the air and hummed a broken tune.

The last datastick still in the console flashed with red letters, Drive Full.

Cassian straightened, and after a moment’s hesitation, he folded his hands neatly behind his back and looked across the space at Sachee. “Late,” he repeated carefully.

“My nest-sisters sent a message to the Alliance several Backups ago,” Sachee told him, and Cassian tried not to let his shock flash across his face.

“I don’t know about any message,” he replied after a moment, feeling his way forward, admitting nothing. “My business here is unrelated to either you or,” he risked a glance to the side, but Raeth hadn’t moved. “My business here is unrelated,” he finished with a brittle edge in his voice.

The Neimoidian lowered his chin, red eyes fixed on Cassian but his wrinkled mouth pulling down into what was possibly a frown. “I know you are Alliance, sir,” he said briskly, and Cassian’s heart stuttered in his chest but he swallowed and forced himself to stay calm. Look calm. It was not over yet. Sachee wanted something from him. “This is a dangerous thing to be, in the Archives.”

Raeth suddenly laughed, a soft, gentle sound. “Better to just be dead, Major,” he said, and his gaze swung to Cassian for the first time. “Like me,” he added cheerfully, and then it was back to the humming, the blank stare.

For the first time, Sachee’s posture seemed to waver, and he looked…sad. “Certh is not kind,” he said to Cassian in a softer tone than he had heard yet, “to those not born in her silver womb.”

Cassian took a deep breath. “What is Marion Raeth to you?”

“Rude,” Raeth said distantly, idly tugging at his sleeve cuff and watching his reflection in the far wall. “Rude to talk about people like they can’t hear.”

“The lieutenant came to Certh over thirty Backups ago, sir,” Sachee was once again stiff and unmoving, his shoulders rigid, his face neutral. “My nest-sisters found him in the data, before he was here.” Raeth reached up and rapped a knuckle sharply on the door behind him, indicating the circuits that carried data through the walls, Cassian assumed. “He was sent here for supporting a proposed law in the Senate banning the use of amenities as payment for labor.”

Despite the situation, and his own danger, Cassian felt a stab of anger and sympathy at the mention. He’d heard of that proposed law; a few years back, Mothma and her supporters had tried to close the “slavery loophole.” Technically, owning slaves was illegal, but if an employer paid his workers (often people trapped into some farce of a contract) in room and board, then it was not slavery. Technically. The Senators had pushed hard for the law, garnering a surprising about of support from many quarters – and then it had been shut down, hard, ostensibly because it would hurt the small business owners who could not afford more than room and board for apprenticeships.

Draven had laughed bitterly when he heard that particular excuse, and then they had gone back to work with no more said about it.

If Raeth had supported that bill…yes, the timing was right. It was just under three years ago. Certh, it seemed, had been his punishment.

“When you arrived,” Sachee continued, “we searched the data for you, too. It took a long time. You are a ghost even in the Bright Galaxy.” He made a noise that sounded a little like a sigh, or a growl. If Cassian made it out of this, he was going to brush up on Neimoidian nonverbal cues. “But we found you, in bits and pieces across the Bright Galaxy, with many names and many uniforms.”

Cassian’s guts were ice, his mind racing. He was burned. He was burned across the whole of the galaxy, _que la fuerza tenga misericordia de mi espíritu-_

“And we erased you,” Sachee brought his hands suddenly around to his chest, and held them, palms up as if in supplication. “For this, I ask your forgiveness.”

_What?_

“Grab you by the heart, don’t they, Major?” Raeth chuckled, and waved at his reflection. “Grab you by the beating heart.”

“I don’t…” Cassian licked his lips, cursed himself for letting the nerves break through his control, and tried again. The sweat was cold and clammy on his back, the rough grey material of the uniform choking him, but he had to get through this. Whatever the hells this was. “I don’t understand.”

“It is a terrible thing, sir,” Sachee explained patiently, folding his hands away behind his back again. “To be erased. We did not do it lightly. But if you are to help us, then we cannot allow you to be known by the parasites who have settled in our mother’s skin.”

“He means the Empire,” Raeth translated helpfully, and he tapped the wall again with a careless knuckle. “And the pyramids. Their mother. One man’s tomb is another man’s mama, funny how that works, isn’t it, Major?”

Across from him, Sachee waited patiently as Cassian worked through the implications. Cassian considered a dozen possible responses, discarded them all – if only Jyn were here, he would have a dozen more – and finally, he settled on the direct approach. “What do you want?”

He expected _free us_ , or _kill the Head Slaver_ or possibly even _destroy this prison in which we are held._

He did not expect Sachee to tilt his head toward the door and say, “Take him with you.”

“Right by the beating heart,” Raeth murmured, as if to himself.

“You want me,” Cassian cleared his throat and tried to sort it out. “You want me to take _him,_ but not you?”

“Certh is not kind to outsiders,” Sachee shrugged. “And he has been kind to us. We would return that favor, before it is too late.”

“Raising the dead,” Raeth interjected in a bright tone that mimicked some kind of frenetic salesperson on the holonet. “Not just for myths and religions anymore! Now you, too, can have your very own Miracle Resurrection, all for the easy price of - ” his voice suddenly dropped into a theatrical growl, “ _your soul_.”

“Indeed, sir,” Sachee said primly.

Raeth laughed and leaned his head back against the door. “Indeed, Sachee. Indeed.”

“If I bring him back,” Cassian shook his head and tried to ignore the unsettling look on Raeth’s face, “then you will keep my identity secret?”

“You seem surprised, sir.”

Cassian sighed, took a small risk. “I am surprised. I expected that you would at least ask for your own freedom.”

Sachee made another noise that may have been a derisive snort, or perhaps that was his version of a laugh. “You have not been down to our levels, sir,” he said, and Cassian got the distinct impression that the Neimoidian was trying to be kind. “You do not understand. This is our home. I was nested here. My mothers were nested here. Once we came from far away, our ancestors torn from their homes, but the Archive fostered and sheltered us. We tend her circuits, we sift through her knowledge.” The Neimoidian smiled at him – he thought it was a smile – and added, “One day we will drive away the parasites, but the Archive is our home.”

A part of Cassian, the cold, calculating part that always pulled away from moments like this, thought, _we could use this_. People who hated the Empire, yet had complete access to all it’s data? Perhaps some kind of permanent posting up on The Shift, rotating operatives through on a regular basis, while people like Sachee sent up data streams. Another part of him, the part that these days sounded a little like Jyn, whispered that he would just be exploiting the labor of slaves, just like the Imperials. _Might as well be a -_

“I will see what I can do,” Cassian said slowly. “It might take some time.”

“I understand, sir,” Sachee nodded briskly, and then he smiled. “My nest-sisters will appreciate the time. They are already wailing to lose our little pink brother.”

Raeth groaned and slumped against the door. “Not pink,” he grumbled. “Just grey.”

“You should be so honored,” Sachee replied, his own wrinkled grey cheeks creasing as he smiled, though his voice sounded strained, and sad.

And then, faster than Cassian’s whirling head could comprehend, they were gone. He stood alone in his grey office, his heart pounding in his chest, his hair damp with sweat, and in the sea of grey, the only color was the red flashing letters on the datastick. Drive Full.

He’d done it.

* * *

 

 

[Day 50 / The Certh Imperial Archives]

[Day 3 / The Shift]

[Day 0 / 1337 GST / Galactic Standard Calendar]

 

* * *

Cassian lay in his bed and watched the man in his ceiling. The cold bit into his skin everywhere, but he lay naked and exposed to it anyway, because watching a full formed (if blurry) person was significantly less disturbing than watching _part_ of one. Not that the man did much. He just lay there, as still as Cassian, and watched.

He hadn’t slept last night. Dozed, yes, little hazy moments where his mind had wandered, imagining red eyes and broken humming and _it’s a terrible thing, to be erased_. He would drift a little further into sleep and then light would flash behind his eyelids, light – shadow – green eyes watching him and he would snap awake again, the man in the ceiling jerking in time to his gasp.

Three hours before Morning Upload, before he had to get up and find out if yesterday had all been some fever dream – or maybe a trap – three hours before he had to go out and face the nightmare that was his waking world, Cassian picked up his datapad. He had already sent off the data from the Backup, with a terse, one-sentence report tacked on the front. Perhaps he could compose a more comprehensive report. Perhaps he could come up with…some way to explain what had happened after the Backup.

He found himself opening a message window, instead.

-

Subj: Day 50

To: Wyla

From: Korr

I am still alive. Yesterday was a long day at the office, but I think I managed to be very productive. I hope you were not too worried but

 

-

He lowered the datapad and stared for a long time at the blinking cursor.

 _You have come late, sir,_ the Neimoidian had said, and wasn’t that just the story of Cassian’s whole damn life? Always running just a little too late, Operation Fracture always just a step behind the Empire, missions where he arrived a moment after his contact fled or died or panicked, hells, all the way back to his childhood, such as it had been, arriving mere hours after his family was already dead, warning the rebel cell on Fest ten minutes after it had been attacked, even old CB-1, left to rust in that old Separatist hideout…

Cassian swallowed, scrubbed his face with his hands, trying to squeeze the thoughts from his head, trying to ignore the movement in the corner of his eye. Jyn would think he was insane, if he told her any of this. Maybe she would be right.

If he didn’t tell anyone, he maybe would go insane.

He picked up the datapad again. To the many hells with it. He could write it down, then delete it. At least it would be out of his head.

-

Subj: Day 50

To: Wyla

From: Korr

I am still alive. Yesterday was a long day at the office, but I think I managed to be very productive. I hope you were not too worried.

I can’t sleep well tonight. That’s not unusual, but it’s a bad night in particular. I am tired but my mind will not rest. I used to think I slept better when I was completely alone, but I think now that is wrong. It’s easier when someone I trust is there. Everything is easier when ~~y~~ someone I trust is there.

Did I ever tell you about CB-1? I was 7 when I found him. B1 battle droid, from the Clone Wars. Damaged from the waist down, couldn’t walk. I was young, lonely, scared, so I dragged him ~~home~~ to a place I could work on him and played around with the wires and chips until I figured out how to start him again. He was not fully functional, but I disabled his attack command sequences so he mostly just sat on the floor by the workbench and talked. I was trying to teach him jokes, but he didn’t really process non-literal commentary. I would say ‘I’m starving’ and he would suggest immediate medical attention and supplements. Once another ~~soldier~~ kid was saying something ridiculous and I said something like ‘you’re killing me,’ because it was so stupid, and CB started wailing these terrible alarms and calling for backup forces.  I had to shut him off for a couple hours to calm him down. I think he meant well.

He was built for cold climates, so he had an internal heater. On the really bitter cold nights I would sleep with my back against him, and he would sound alarms if anyone walked into the room to wake me up. It was like having a friend, though he was broken still and couldn’t do or think much. I think that was the last really good sleep I had for a long time until I woke up in the medward and you were there.

I had to leave CB behind ~~when the fighting got bad in my city~~. ~~Dra~~ My mentor showed up when I was 9 and we had to leave in a hurry. Sometimes I think I could have gone back and got him, but most of the time I know I could not. It hurts to think of him just going dark in the old ~~base~~ workshop. I think that’s why I liked it when you slept in my bunk those few times. Like having a friend, except you are not broken, and you are so much more than just warmth and safety. You are those too, but you are

 

-

Cassian hunched over the edge of his bunk and groaned. What was he doing? Writing nonsense, dangerous nonsense, all because he was stuck in a nasty operation without immediate backup and –

And he missed her.

Cassian sucked in a deep breath, blew it out slowly, and looked up to glare at his featureless reflection. The reflection looked back, although whether it was glaring at him in turn, he couldn’t tell in the poor light.

It was foolish and dangerous to lie to himself about his own feelings. Foolish and dangerous to ignore something that could be a weakness (or a strength).

Cassian sat up straight and stared at his shadowy twin across the room. He missed Jyn. He wanted her here, despite all logic and sanity. He needed her messages to keep coming, to know that she was safe and waiting nearby. Relatively near by.

He might, perhaps, even love her.

Whatever that meant.

But, he reminded himself, this was not the time. He still had twenty more days to go. Cassian deleted the message and tossed the datapad to the side, propping his elbows on his knees and closing his eyes for awhile. His back ached, a combination of yesterday’s stress and his Scarif injuries acting up. He bent his neck in a half-hearted attempt to stretch it out, then sighed and opened his eyes, preparing to get up, get dressed early, take a moment to rethink his morning message to Jyn.

The red light on his datapad blinked at him - _message sent, receipt unknown_ – and Cassian froze.

Message sent?

 

 

Shit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter took way too long, because I had to calculate the times out a lot and I may have made mistakes. 
> 
> The thing about Neimoidians being known ‘disease vectors’ is from [Legends-canon](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Neimoidian/Legends): _“Neimoidians are known by most denizens of the galaxy as being notorious virus carriers, responsible for such diseases as the Great Pandemic of Deersheba and the Intestinal Revenge of Bars Barka, with many claiming that the chief export of Neimoidia was Brainworm Rot Type C. This history of reported disease cases grew so virulent that by 6 ABY, Neimoidia was officially quarantined and declared off limits to all travelers.”_ Which probably did a number of their trade-based economy, just got to say. (And considering that by 6 ABY, the New Republic was on the rise and the last dregs of the Empire fading….that’s not a great start for the good guys.) I’m just going to drop a little observation that historically, one of the best ways to undercut a rival is to make everyone else afraid to talk to them. Or touch them. Or be near them in general. And “dirty” is a slur that’s been used to great and horrible effect in all forms of history.


	4. Push the trigger and I pull the thread

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember how I said this would get worse before it got better?  
> I lied.  
> Sorry.

* * *

 

[Day 52 / The Certh Imperial Archives]

[Day 3 / The Shift]

[Day 0 / 1401 GST / Galactic Standard Calendar]

* * *

Cassian stood in the elevator with Jyn. Her green eyes seared into him, red blood on her collar, brown hair floating across her cheek. No sound. Light flashed.

Ghostly faces drifted behind Jyn’s shoulders, silent, grey eyes watching him, glaring, judging – Tivik gasped as blood welled between his crooked teeth, Sal Huvron wept with her bondmate’s body in her shaking arms, Galen Erso shook his head, a sniper hole burned precisely in the center of his forehead. Cassian tore his eyes away, looked at Jyn, looked for the green fire in her eyes because it was better to burn than suffocate. The metal wall was cold against Cassian’s shoulder, muted pain in his body, but –

Jyn face, peace, light, green eyes, shadow, light, green, shadow, light, green, shadow – except – except –

Grey poisoned her, the light dying and turning cold and empty as the walls of the elevator. He opened his mouth but Jyn reached cold grey hands out towards his throat and he braced for the pain, braced for the moment she tore his heart out as the elevator plunged down into the darkness.

Cassian woke up. Grey light. Grey sheet, hanging in front of his face. Grey carpet.

Grey carpet?

He blinked. His cheek was pressed against the thin, rough gravel grey carpet of his quarters, the gunmetal grey bedsheet swinging gently in front of his eyes in time with his breathing was hanging from the edge of the scratchy grey bunk that…

That he had apparently fallen out of in his sleep.

Well.

That was embarrassing.

Across from him in the pale grey wall, the indistinct form of a naked man lay in a heap on the floor, watching him impassively. Cassian stared back.

Green light in the corner of his eye. Green light on his datapad.

Two days since he had sent through that stupid, confused, terrifyingly honest message. That meant this morning would be Jyn’s response.

Cassian jolted awake, hoisting himself clumsily from lying on the cold carpet to sitting on the edge of the bed, scrubbing at his face with chilled hands. Right. His message to Jyn, wherein he had rambled about being tired and wanting her in his bed and something about the droid he’d salvaged as a child in the Fest rebel cell, the message where he had cut off abruptly and then accidentally hit “send” instead of “delete.” The message that would probably convince Jyn that he was either pathetic or insane or both. (His message last night had been carefully worded to minimize the damage, a brief _Still alive. Doing alright. Be safe._ But now time had caught up to him and he had to face the consequences.)

(Now he had to face her answer.)

Cassian stared at the blinking green light on the datapad and debated the possible responses. What would Kay tell him, if he were here? What would Jyn tell him, if she were here herself? _Mierda, quería que estuviera aquí_ – no, no, dangerous to think like that; Major Aldin Korr had never been to Fest, Major Aldin Korr did not speak anything other than Basic, his accent only a distant remnant of his ancestors, and maybe a nice check in the “diversity” box for the Imperial recruiters who cared about maintaining a certain public image.

If Kay were here, he would say that there was a…a...hm, a fifty-three percent chance that Jyn’s response was purely business, ignoring entirely his weird sidebar into nonsensical nostalgia. forty-two percent chance she would demand to know what was wrong with him, and ask if she should pull him out early. That left a five percent chance that she would – oh, but wait, he had to allow for her “randomizing factor,” a phrase that Kay always said with a peculiar note of interest and frustration. K2SO loved a number puzzle, and considered Jyn’s unpredictability to be one of the biggest (and most frustrating) challenges ever set before his processors.

Cassian realized he was smiling, imagining the little grinding noise in Kay’s chassis whenever Jyn confounded one of his behavioral calculations, the triumph in Jyn’s face when he admitted it.

It felt…odd, to smile. Good, in a way, but also wrong. Dangerous. Cassian scrubbed at his face again.

The green light on his datapad blinked, blinked, blinked.

He sighed, and picked it up.

If she ignored his incoherent message, then he would too. If she was upset or confused, he could pass it off as extreme exhaustion after a long night.

He opened the message.

\--

[Additional Encryption Required]

[Please Enter Passkey]

\--

Additional encryption? She had added _additional_ encryption to the already paranoid layers that both of them had slathered on this direct line between them?

But what could the password be?

Hesitantly, he typed in “Jyn Erso.”

_Error: Try Again._

Even more hesitantly, “Cassian Andor.”

 _Error: Try Again_.

Alliance.

Rebellion.

Operative.

 _Error: Try Again_.

In frustration, he typed “PASSWORD,” and then rolled his eyes at himself as _Error: Try Again_ flashed at him in reprimand. The password was probably something obvious only to the two of them, something she would assume only he would guess. But what would that be? And why would she even take the trouble to re-code an entire additional layer of protection on this message? What was _in_ it that would make her so paranoid?

Something only the two of them would think to type.

Hope.

 _Error: Try Again_.

He sighed. It would have been nice, he supposed, if it were that.

She was responding to his last message. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine her face, sitting in the U-Wing on The Shift, flipping through his reports and his personal messages, probably with her feet on the console because he wasn’t there to glare at her for it, forgetting to eat at decent intervals because Kay wasn’t there to make pointed remarks about the benefits of a regular biological schedule –

Abruptly, he remembered another time, another U-Wing, Jyn crouching on the deck with a decidedly familiar blaster in her hand and a tense, wary look on her face as Cassian stood over her. Kay, he recalls, had looked on from a few steps away, ready to step forward and kill her if she raised that blaster anywhere near Cassian, and from the way her eyes flicked past his shoulder before locking on his, she had known it. Cassian hunched over the datapad and recalled with uncomfortable clarity the way her mouth had drawn down and her shoulders tightened, braced for a blow, braced for either of her new wardens to force her to disarm, force her back into submission, back into vulnerability.

And he had almost done it, too, almost demanded that she remain unarmed in a confined space with an armed soldier and a droid built to kill, both of them total strangers and definitely not friendly to her (at the time, it had seemed so reasonable to him; funny how it just made him feel sick now). And then she’d looked him right in the eye and thrown down her gauntlet between them: _trust goes both ways._

What had he said to her, in that disaster of a message last night?

_It’s easier when someone I trust is here._

Cassian opened his eyes (the man in the walls sat up straighter, clutching a datapad-shaped void in front of his bare chest), and typed in _trust._

\--

[Passkey Accepted]

[Decrypting…]

[(1) New Message]

 

Subj: RE: Day 50

To: Korr

From: Wyla

Had an SE-2 droid on our farm when I was a kid. Essie. He was the only other person around except for my parents. When he wasn’t working on the farm machines, I considered him my personal playmate. Probably confused the hells out of him with my games and stories, his processor wasn’t very good. And he was old. And my parents weren’t as good with droids as they were with theories. Rocks. Physics. Maybe broke him a couple times because when he rattled or made weird sounds I always tried to help. Mostly I helped by poking him with whatever tool was closest and looked the right shape. Didn’t learn about droids until later when I went to that boarding school. My teacher wasn’t focused much on fixing droids. Bet you could have fixed him. Everyone says how good with droids you were, even when you first joined the military. Maybe sometime you could teach me to fix them. Would like to be able to fix things instead of just wreck them.

I haven’t slept much lately either. Probably for the same reasons.

Still pissed at you for working too hard. No reason to beat yourself up down there. Job’s almost done. Just do the work and don’t grind yourself down. Boss won’t give you a raise, if that’s what you’re angling for. I would rather bring you home in one piece. Your mum will have my head if I don’t, remember. So for my sake, ease up.

Miss you.

Stay safe.

[Delete Message Y/N?]

\--

Cassian swallowed, realized that for some stupid reason, his heart was jackhammering in his chest. The message was…long, much longer than anything she’d ever written him, longer than anything he had ever received. At least, longer than anything he’d ever received as Cassian Andor (because he _was_ Cassian Andor, underneath Major Aldin Korr, underneath the layers of grey uniform and grey attitude and grey nightmares, and something small and shivering and tight in his chest relaxed suddenly, remembering).

Jyn had a droid friend she was a child. Cassian closed his eyes and tried to conjure up the mental image of a small Jyn Erso playing games with an SE model droid (not that far removed in structure and coding from the battle droid he had rescued on Fest, absent the destructive coding and the militant lingo in the programming). She probably ran in circles around the poor thing, making up stories and laughing in delight as it lurched and buzzed at her. The image was unbearably cute, a little bit sad, and weirdly soothing.

With his eyes shut, the chill in Cassian’s room was suddenly insistent and irritating. He grimaced, set the datapad on the edge of the bed, and yanked the grey sheets up and around his body. The man in the grey walls vanished abruptly, only his head still floating parallel to Cassian’s. He ignored it, picking up the datapad and reading the message again. The long, involved, carefully phrased message that took pains to avoid names, situations, or direct references to anything ( _that boarding school_ actually made him chuckle a little under his breath, a rusty sound that echoed in the dim light of the barren room but felt surprisingly good in his mouth. He supposed Saw Gerrera’s curriculum of guerilla warfare and hard life lessons was indeed a form of education.)

Cassian had woken up early this morning, so he had almost two hours to read and pick through the letter. He huddled under the scratchy sheets and marveled at the trust in the phrase _my parents_ , the wistfulness of _instead of just wreck them,_ the uncomplicated sweetness of _bet you could have fixed him_ and the decidedly complicated undertone of _you could teach me_. His semi-reflection shifted and fluttered in the corner of his vision, but Jyn wasn’t sleeping well, _probably for the same reasons,_ so his mind dismissed the movements as immaterial.

His eyes kept circling back to _I would rather bring you home,_ his breath catching just slightly every time.

It was probably pathetic, or possibly pathologic, how long he stared at _miss you._

It could mean anything. He was her partner. Jyn hadn’t had one of those before, not a real one. They had been through a great deal together. She was probably sleep deprived even worse than Cassian himself – it was, what, day three on The Shift? Three days of only power-napping for short bursts of time, an hour at most between his report updates that she immediately sent on to the Alliance. After, apparently, reading through them. He had not really allowed himself to wonder why she was sacrificing sleep time to read his reports as well as his messages. Was she…looking for him in the brisk, neutrally worded reports? Trying to hear his voice in even the bland words, the way he was trying so hard to hear her netmail message in her voice?

A loud hum vibrated through the bed and up into his spine, the walls flashed purple, and Cassian jolted to his feet with his heart in his mouth and acid suddenly churning in his gut.

Time! He had lost track of –

He had two minutes, at best. Seconds, at worst.

Cassian smacked the datapad off and scrambled for his uniform, yanking it on with record speed. His jacket was still hanging open on his shoulders and he was jamming his feet into his untied boots when door rattled under the familiar pounding knock. He took a deep breath, steadied himself, and neatly tied up his boots. Just before he hit the door release, he shoved a hand through his hair and buttoned his jacket as briskly as he could, hoping desperately that his blank expression hid the hammering of his heart.

“Morning, Major,” Raeth drawled, his smile a little lopsided and showing too many teeth. His eyes were slightly unfocused, but he glanced at Cassian’s hair and blinked. His smile grew a little wider, and behind him, Sachee lowered his chin and made a brief fluttering gesture with one hand. (Cassian _needed_ to look up Neimoidian nonverbal cues as soon as he got back to base, it was ridiculous how much context he was probably missing every time Sachee blinked at him).

Raeth, on the other hand, was easy to read. His smile was sly, but in the offhand manner of someone telling himself a good joke that he knows no one else will get. He leaned against the doorjamb and knocked his gloved knuckle idly against the reflection of his head in the wall behind him. “Sleep in a bit, sir?”

“A bit,” Cassian answered stiffly. “Lieutenant,” he added after an awkward beat. _Major Aldin Korr,_ he reminded himself sharply, but it felt less like settling into the skin of an alias and more like hastily throwing a badly-fitted jacket over his shoulders. “Shall we?” is tone  was a bit more biting than was really called for, struggling for the right balance of Imperial discipline, disapproval, and distance.

“Uh, Major?” Raeth’s smile was positively frightening now, far too delighted for comfort. Vaguely, Cassian thought of the stories of the Toothy Tooka that Bodhi liked to tell sometimes, stories that mostly confused Jyn and unsettled Cassian. _We’re all mad here_ , Bodhi seemed most fond of quoting, and in the familiarity of the rebel base or the quiet safety of hyperspace with his team, it was a gentle joke.

Here, the words echoed in Cassian’s head like a scream.

Sachee’s red eyes glinted in the harsh white light of the hallway.

Cassian cleared his throat and touched his top jacket button, ensuring it was tightly done up. “Yes, Lieutenant?”

Raeth tapped his temple – no, he was tapping the edge of his cap – his _cap_. Cassian bit down on the curse that rose unbidden on his tongue and spun on his heel, marching back into his quarters and snatching his officer’s cap from the table by the bed. The head of his ghost floated alongside him. Cassian brushed his hair back one more time and settled the cap carefully in place. Before he walked out (pathetic, it was pathetic, but it settled the frenzy in his chest a little so he tried not to be too hard on himself for it), he trailed his fingers over the now-blank screen of the datapad. _I would rather bring you home in one piece. Stay safe_.

 _Miss you_.

Cassian squared his shoulders.

“So, Major,” Raeth said pleasantly, falling in step with Cassian down the hall and toward the elevator, “Sachee tells me that your time is almost up.”

Cassian clenched his jaw. Joke, attack, or poorly worded but innocent comment? It was fucking impossible to tell with Raeth; Cassian would not lash out, regardless. Either the Imperial was testing him, and this was bait he needed to ignore, or the man was truly lost in his own head, and Cassian’s reaction would go right over him. Either way, Sachee might respond poorly, and whatever else Cassian believed about the Neimoidian, he knew the man had the power to destroy him. All it would take would be a word to the wrong Imperial…

“I have nineteen more days on this duty rotation,” he said instead, fighting to keep his tone even. _Just do the work,_ Jyn had written, and she was right. There was nothing more to be gained by pushing his luck, and everything to lose.

 _Job’s almost done_ , he reminded himself. Now all he had to do was just get home.

“Nineteen,” Raeth echoed, settling back against the wall of the elevator as Sachee selected the correct floor and Cassian looked at his boots to avoid looking at the ghosts in the walls (but they stood on the edges of his vision anyway, watching him back). “Nineteen days. Niiiiiiineteen.” The lieutenant whistled softly, and chuckled. “Back to the land of the living, in only nineteen days.”

“Technically, sir,” Sachee said, face turned to the elevator door but his red eyes glinting in the walls, watching from multiple angles, the slave standing among the ghosts, “Major Korr departs on the morning of the nineteenth day. Which gives him only eighteen days to complete his work in the Archives.”

Cassian looked up and met the red eyes in the wall. Eighteen days to get Raeth passage out of Certh. He lifted his head, glancing from Sachee to the Imperial he was protecting, and raised an eyebrow. _And if I fail?_

He realized belatedly that Sachee might not understand Human body language any better than Cassian understood Neimoidian, but then the slave tilted his head into exactly the same angle, the brow ridges on his grey face shifting to…match Cassian’s expression perfectly. Interesting, he hadn’t known they could do that. Well, at least that cleared things up. Unless he was gravely mistaken, the answer to his question was _don’t fail._

All he had to do was get home.

“Indeed, Sachee,” Raeth grinned and mimicked Sachee’s prim tone. “Indeed.”

 

* * *

 

[Day 55 / The Certh Imperial Archives]

[Day 3 / The Shift]

[Day 0 / 1449 GST / Galactic Standard Calendar]

* * *

Cassian stood in the elevator with Jyn. Her green eyes burned, red blood on her collar, brown hair across her cheek. No sound. Light flashed.

Ghostly faces behind Jyn’s shoulders, silent, grey eyes watching – Tivik, Sal Huvron, Be’rex, the Gand, Galen Erso – so many faces, so many deaths, all of them his (no, wait, not all, not _all,_ he hadn’t - )

Jyn moved closer and the ghosts no longer mattered.

Cassian looked for the green fire in her eyes, choosing to burn.

Jyn face, peace, light, green eyes, shadow, light, green, shadow, light, green, shadow –

Grey poisoned her, the light dying and turning cold and empty, as empty as the walls, as empty as the great gaping void in his chest where his spine had been torn out. He opened his mouth but Jyn reached cold grey hands towards his heart and he braced for the pain –

“Trust goes both ways,” she said, his blaster in her hand and blood on her wrists from the chains he hadn’t put on her.

Cassian woke up.

She spoke. He’d heard her. It had been so real that he could almost still hear her, ringing in his ears just under the hum of the air recycler in his

Grey quarters. Grey sheets. Grey light. Grey reflection in the grey ceiling.

Cassian closed his eyes, tried to hear her again, but it was gone. Nothing but the endless grey - and the small green light on his datapad.

\--

[Passkey Accepted]

[Decrypting…]

[(2) New Messages]

  

Subj: RE: Day 53

To: Korr

From: Wyla

Found a delivery service that brings food to the docks. Stocked up on some good stuff for when you get back. You can’t have the shroomchips though. Those are mine. I always liked the purple ones best. Think they’re flavored for some root? Never looked it up. Maybe I will while you’re down there. Do you want anything specific? You should send me a list of stuff you want me to pick up or order. Will get us set up. Don't be stuffy about it, your boss won't care if I use appropriate channels and don't waste funds. Which I won't, because I know what I'm doing.

Getting bored in between messages. This place is boring. Nothing here but shopping and people taking holos. Never liked shopping, even when I took the challenging route. Like I was telling you before you left. Considered trying a few of those plans, but decided I didn't need anything that bad around here. Takes ages to shop, then you have to haggle. Would rather just grab the thing I need and go.

You can cook? You never said. When you get back you should tell me about it. Better yet just show me.

Almost time to come home.

Stay safe.

[Delete Message Y/N?]

\--

Cassian read the message twice, the datapad balanced on his knees, the grey sheets hiked up around his shoulders to ward off the chill of his quarters. He glanced at the chrono – just enough time. He flipped the text color to dark blue and the background to light yellow, read the message again, and then sat with his eyes closed for two, three breaths.

 _Almost time to come home_.

Then he flipped the screen colors back to black and white, and opened the second message.

\--

Subj: RE: Staffing Request

To: Korr, Aldin [MAJ, IMPNAV43356]

From: PERSONNEL COMMAND, CERTH ARCHIVES

Sir,

Your request for the personnel transfer of RAETH, MARION [LT, IMPNAV22180] from INFORMATION DOMINANCE COMMAND, CERTH ARCHIVES, UNIT 7534527H678D to QUALITY ASSURANCE COMMAND, CORUSCANT, UNIT 98624SSW87 has been received and filed. It will take 5 – 8 business days (Certh) for the appropriate authorities to review and certify this request. Please ensure all forms have been filled out correctly, to facilitate swift and efficient processing.

With Respect,

Wilfered, Tohmas [YN2, IMPNAV712345C]

PERSCOMCERTH

[Delete Message Y/N?]

\--

Cassian’s gut clenched, the warmth from Jyn’s message evaporating in the face of the standard, form-letter response to his request to transfer Raeth from Certh’s archives to his own command (no, to _Korr’s_ command, not his, never _his_ ; the universe would collapse into itself before Cassian Andor became a lackey for that slime on the false-throne).

He should never have filed this. It required far too many people to look at it, far too many higher officials to approve and sign. It was not unknown for a visiting officer to request transference of a local to their own command, but it was still unusual. It drew attention, however tepid. If Raeth was truly a victim of vindictive Imperial politics, his name might ping on higher radars than Cassian could afford to be seen on. Someone might wonder why an inspector would have any interest in a disgraced low-level clerk. Someone might come looking.

But the shuttles that ran between the highly classified archives of Certh and the commercially popular Shift station were well scanned and carefully monitored. There was simply no way Cassian could ever have smuggled the man offworld and to the Alliance. Official permission was his only option.

Even if it would probably get them both killed.

 _Just do the work_ , Jyn had said, and he wanted to listen. He wanted to get through this. He wanted to come home.

 If he didn’t get Raeth out of here, Sachee might decide to destroy the spy who broke faith. The casual way the Neimoidian spoke of “erasing” Cassian from the archives, from the entirety of Imperial records, was terrifying. How easily could the slaves of Certh manipulate the data that the Empire hoarded like mynocks hoarding gold? If Sachee could erase Cassian across exaFLOPs of data, how hard would it be to make the reverse true, and burn not only him but all his identities, his contacts, and his allies associated with each alias? How many people would die, if the slaves turned on him? How much did Sachee’s people really know about Cassian Andor?

How much did he know about this mission in particular? Did he know about Major Korr’s hired driver, waiting for him for a few restless days on The Shift? Even if Cassian somehow miraculously snuck himself out of this grey nightmare world, he might walk into the docking port and find his partner and his ship in the merciless grip of stormtroopers. If he was lucky.

He would kill Raeth himself before he led the Imperials to Jyn (he would kill Korr, too, and Sward and Aach and all the dozens of others, all gone in one sharp _bite_ if that’s what it took).

Cassian took a sharp breath. He was…getting ahead of himself.

So far, he had a minor request for an officer transfer and fifteen days of waiting in the grey silence. No need for desperate measures yet. No need to panic.

He opened Jyn’s message again. She wanted him to show her how to cook. Or at least, how he cooked.

He could do that.

First, he should…he should find out what she liked to eat.

Cassian pulled the sheets a little tighter around his shoulders, forced himself to focus on the datapad in front of him, and opened a new message window.

* * *

[Day 57 / The Certh Imperial Archives]

[Day 4 / The Shift]

[Day 0 / 1514 GST / Galactic Standard Calendar]

* * *

 

The messages from Jyn had already been a touchstone to sanity and comfort for him, but now they became a lifeline, something not only to anchor him to the reality outside of Certh’s crushing grey atmosphere but also to distract him from the looming threat of his request to Personnel Command. Cassian’s world narrowed to trying to discretely copy datastreams during the day, trying to parse Raeth’s disjointed chatter during their brief walks to and from the office, and trying to piece together the fascinating puzzle of Jyn Erso in the evenings. A part of him wanted to construct a matrix to keep all the little bits and pieces of herself that she was sending him through their now quadruple-encoded private channel (on Day 57, she wrote _Never really liked the taste of caf, its way too bitter unless you add in a fuck ton of sweetener,_ but the next day she casually mentioned that she liked to put lemon in things _to give them a bite)._ Fortunately, he wasn’t mad enough yet to create anything so risky while he was on this Imperial hellsite.

(“Morning, Major,” Raeth grinned at him after he received a long message from Jyn commenting on all the foods she’d ever liked that she could remember, and asked him playfully if he thought he could top the Corellians for spicy food – which he absolutely _could_ , thank you – and Cassian knew without looking that his face reflected some of his good humor. “Have a good night, sir? In Certh?” Raeth had widened his grin to show all his teeth, and Cassian had forced himself to meet the other man’s slightly vacant eyes. “Pretty sure that’s against regulations, Major,” the lieutenant said in a sing-song voice. “Might want to beeeeeeeeeee careful!”)

(He stole forty-three dossiers on known Imperial informants in Corellia that day, and spent a good hour on the heavily-monitored holonet looking up recipes with lemon in them.)

On Day 59, Jyn told him about the slicing job that went wrong on Kuat, the job that landed her in Wobani. She gave few details, but he could read between the lines enough to understand – her temporary team had seen the Imperials coming and fled the building they were accessing…without telling Jyn. She had found out when a stormtrooper patrol burst into the upper office where she was working on a console. _It was a bit of a brangle_ , she told him, which was Jyn’s way of telling him there were multiple casualties. _Took a few hits, was ugly for a bit_ meant she had been beaten, badly, and Cassian had to get up and walk around his small room (the ghosts trailed in his wake, damn them) to stop himself from demanding a medical rundown. To stop himself from asking how many scars they had left on her, and where.  To stop himself from thinking how he wanted to run his hands over those scars, drop to his knees and kiss the evidence that she had survived anyway.

 _Please don’t get into any brangles up there without me,_ he sent back. She hadn’t responded to that, and Cassian ordered himself not to overthink it. The time difference meant that she received his responses a day after he sent them, and they both knew her own answers came to him a day after _that._ With a two day gap between them, Cassian left some questions and comments pass by without challenge or follow up, because it was just too confusing and he couldn’t gauge how sensitive she might be to any…pressure. He mentally catalogued each one, however, from stories that mentioned _a_ _bit of a brangle_ to the ones that casually remarked _I learned that lesson the hard way_ to the story about her favorite toy as a child that ended with _Never told anyone about that before._

Especially that last one.

(“Roses in your ears today, Major,” Raeth told him, slumping in the elevator against the back wall as Sachee looked on in the reflection of the door. “Or in your eyes. I forget where the roses go when you’re happy. Is it the eyes, Sachee? The happiness?”

“The cheeks, sir,” Sachee replied smoothly as Cassian cleared his throat and tried not to let any part of his face turn rosy at all. “Humans say that roses grow in the cheeks when one is happy.”)

(Cassian dreamed that night of an elevator flashing light to dark, light to dark, but Jyn watched him with green eyes the whole way down. When he woke up, she had sent him a joke she’d found on the holonet while keeping herself awake these last few hours, some kind of silly math problem calculating the worth of a sentient soul in cupcakes, with a note asking if he agreed with the mathematical method. Cassian found himself grinning much wider than the joke warranted, until even the ghosts in the walls seemed to be laughing too.)

He found himself picking through his own memories, too, hunting for the things he could send back to her, little fragments of his own soul dusted off and carefully sent up through the distortion of the line. _I learned to cook from my parents_ , he told her on Day 60, a little drunk on his own audacity. _My father loved to put things in a skillet and see how they all combined together, but my mother preferred cooking only one thing at a time to preserve the integrity of it._

(He’d forgotten that, actually, the different styles his parents used to make the large dinners that fed his once-large family.)

  _I’m not getting up to any brangles,_ her message on Day 62, _I’m keeping to the ship and waiting for my hire to come home_ , and despite his best efforts Cassian slumped in relief. It was highly undignified, and his ghost in the walls shook it’s head with disappointment.

 _I’m named for an uncle, I think,_ he confessed on Day 63, carefully refraining from mentioning any details on the connection to this uncle, lest anyone read it and think to look more into Makor Aldin Korr’s family background. _I only remember because they used to put “little” or “baby” in front of my first name. I hated it at the time because my cousins all teased me ~~but now that I think of it again, I miss.~~ But I suppose children grow up eventually._

 _My parents were shite at cooking_ , her reply told him that day, and he still felt that small, shivering thrill inside his gut at the quiet trust she granted him, even when she wasn’t there. _Didn’t know it until later when I found out that food isn’t supposed to be burnt_.

(“Your form has been processed in PERSCOM, sir,” Sachee informed him calmly as Raeth whistled in the elevator, his tune aimless but his grey eyes sharp on Cassian’s face.

Cassian glanced at the elevator security camera and raised an eyebrow, but the slave seemed unmoved by the possibility of anyone watching the feeds, so he risked a careful, “Has it been approved?”

“I would never presume, sir,” Sachee replied gravely as Raeth’s tune shifted to a minor key, “to read your messages.”)

 _I didn’t learn to swim until I was twelve,_ he felt safe enough to tell her after reading her story about swimming with her “stepdad” for a “competitive race” (which he translated as Gerrera teaching her to swim so she could somehow use the skill against Imperial soldiers). _I can keep myself afloat, but I should probably work more on form and endurance._

 _I can put baby in front of your name, if it makes you feel better_ , she responded on Day 64, and his heart thumped in his chest as he read it again. _Especially on the training mat_ , she added, and though he could tell it was meant as a cover for the flirtiness of her first comment, it instead conjured imaged in his head of Jyn pinning him down on a training mat and grinning in triumph above him.

(“A whole garden in your face at this rate, Major,” Raeth murmured that morning. Cassian dug his toes into the inside of his boot to distract himself from flinching or clenching his jaw, until the pain in his foot cleared his head enough that he could shrug convincingly. It was wasted effort, though, because Raeth had somehow gotten into a staring contest with his own ghosts in the elevator walls, and didn’t see.

Sachee watched with red eyes, and made no comment.)

 _I’m sleeping a bit better,_ Cassian reassured Jyn on Day 66, the knowledge that he was only a few days from seeing her again pulsing under his skin. Perhaps that was what made him bold, perhaps that was why he swallowed the fear and took the risk, and added, _I jumped when someone brushed my arm in the mess hall today, so I think it’s probably best that I get off this planet soon. There’s a reason the standard duty cycle here is so short._

 _You don’t need endurance training_ , Jyn told him flatly, in one of her shortest messages since the beginning of the op. _You know how to endure_.

(Your request for the personnel transfer of RAETH, MARION [LT, IMPNAV22180] from INFORMATION DOMINANCE COMMAND, CERTH ARCHIVES, UNIT 7534527H678D to QUALITY ASSURANCE COMMAND, CORUSCANT, UNIT 98624SSW87 has been approved at the Company Level (his inbox informed his coldly on Day 66).  It will take 3 – 5 business days (Certh) for approval at the Executive Level. Please ensure all forms have been filled out correctly, to facilitate swift and efficient processing.

Cassian grit his teeth and flipped the message box back to Jyn’s message, willing his breathing to be slow and steady, reading her words again. _You know how to endure_.)

 _Only two more messages from me,_ he reminded her on Day 67. _And you shouldn’t bother to respond to the second one, in case it gets hung up in the server traffic._

 _I think it’s best you get out of there, too_ , she replied.

(“Lieutenant Raeth will accompany me to The Shift Station in three days,” Cassian informed Sachee and his charge in the elevator. He kept his tone clipped and professional, because the slave might not fear the security holocams but the spy had no choice. “His transfer approval will likely come through after I have departed, but will be archived by the time we arrive on the station.”

The slave’s ghostly reflection tilted his head, “And if he is approved?”

“Then I will add him to my staff at my home office.”

A long pause. “And if he is not?”

“Then he sends me back,” Raeth shrugged, and tapped a knuckle on the wall. “And I get to make the Welcome-To-Hell speech again, but for myself.”

His laughter bounced eerily inside the enclosed space as Sachee’s red eyes bored into Cassian from the walls, and that night Cassian dreamed it again while he stood in the elevator flashing dark to light, dark to light, but Jyn’s eyes glowed red and dangerous and watchful.)

On Day 68, Cassian’s inbox didn’t turn green with an incoming message until it was almost time for him to get up and dressed. He tried not to read too much into that – this was the last message he could expect from Jyn before he saw her again. Perhaps she had…taken her time with it. Perhaps she had something important to say.

He opened the message.

_Are you still_

Cassian’s guts turned to ice.

_Are you still_

He refreshed his inbox, but no new messages appeared.

_Are you still_

There was nothing else, the message was simply a fragment with no sign off, no explanation, no customary _Stay safe._

_Are you still_

Was he still what? Still receiving messages? Still here? Still alive?

_Que la Fuerza de los demás esté conmigo._

Was _she?_

Cassian’s heart was throbbing in his chest, but every other part of him was cold, brittle as icicles on the eaves, his skin chilled from the recycled air in the grey room, his insides a terrible frozen mass because something had happened. Something had happened to Jyn.

He fired off a message, _what happened? Are you alright?_ _Did something malfunction?_

_Are you still_

Cassian stood up, paced across the steel grey carpet (his ghostly reflection grew bigger, bigger, until he was as large as the real man he shadowed) and set his palms against the gunmetal grey wall (against the ghost’s grunmetal grey palms). Grey reflections in the walls, moving just in the corner of his eye.

He turned on his heels and strode back to the grey bed, picked up the datapad he had discarded, sent another message. It would arrive…the distortion had approximately a fourteen to one ratio to Certh time…so it would arrive approximately three hours and twenty-nine minutes after his first. _Did something happen? ~~Do you need~~ ~~Can I help~~ If you need assistance, please let me know._

He refreshed his inbox. Nothing.

_Are you still_

Back to the grey wall, back to the grey ghost, hands on the cold grey metal, hands on the cold grey hands of the man who stared at him through the fog of the Imperial Archives’ circuit-covered walls. Grey reflections in the walls, moving just in the corner of his eye.

Cassian closed his eyes, grit his teeth. A loud hum, purplish light bleeding through his eyelids, brief heat in his bare palms like hands pressing back against him, silence.

Right on cue, a pounding on his door.

Cassian stared at the ghost.

_Are you still_

Another knock on the door. “Major?” Raeth’s voice was lilting and lyrical; it must have been a “noisy” night, so a bad day for him. A bad day for Cassian.

A bad day for Jyn?

Another pound on Cassian’s (Korr’s) door. “Having a bit of a lie in, sir? Bad form, you know. Bad form.”

Cassian stared at the grey ghost in the wall under his palms.

( _You know how to endure_.)

He shoved himself upright. The ghost stood rigidly, looking at him. “One moment, please,” he snapped at the door. It took him almost three whole minutes to dress and comb his hair into some semblance of order, jamming the cap on top with more force than necessary. He snatched the datapad off the bed, opened another message, and sent one more sentence.

 _Please respond_.

Refresh inbox.

Nothing.

“Noisy night for you, too, sir?” Raeth rocked on his heels absently when Cassian threw open the door and marched out before he could stop himself, before he could turn and go back to his datapad and send another plea into the abyss, begging for an answer. Begging for some sign that his lifeline hadn’t been cut.

“You will depart with me at zero-six-hundred Certh time in two days,” Major Aldin Korr barked, marching past the startled lieutenant and ignoring the silent slave who slipped into his wake. “Have your gear prepped and on shuttle Fifteen Resh ten minutes prior to launch.”

“Yessir, Major, sir,” Raeth tossed a vague salute with two fingers and then sidled to the far side of the elevator, closer to Sachee, his eyes wandering across the ghosts in the walls with restless nervous energy.

Cassian didn’t care.

They did not speak further for the rest of the interminable elevator ride (the light was too bright here, no shadows, and definitely no green eyes), and when the door opened, Cassian strode to his office without looking back at either man.

_Are you still_

It might be a mistake.

It might be a malfunction.

It might be that an Imperial counter-intelligence officer had finally noticed the steady stream of heavily encrypted messages in the server traffic.

It might be that she was –

Cassian locked his grey door.

He sat at this grey desk.

Turned on his grey console.

Typed in his password.

Typed it in again, correctly.

Opened the files that Major Aldin Korr was inspecting and Captain Cassian Andor was stealing.

He stood up.

Sat back down.

_Are you still_

She had survived too much to vanish while he was trapped so close and yet so painfully, uselessly far. She had given too much to die without warning or explanation. She was…they were…

One more report to transmit tonight. He was expected to give one more report. After that, it would be pointless to try and steal anything from the Archives. His gear would be scanned as he left, his datapad confiscated, any datadrives he carried destroyed. Tonight was his last report. If he wanted to, if he dared, he could send one more message tomorrow morning and reasonably expect it to make it through the distortion to The Shift before this operation was over.

Before he left with Jyn.

If he left with Jyn.

_Are you still_

He wasn’t leaving without Jyn.

Maybe she would have sent a message by the time he got back to his quarters.

Grey reflections in the walls, moving just in the corner of his eye.

Cassian pressed his forehead to the grey desk and closed his eyes.

He wasn’t leaving without Jyn.

One more report to send.

( _You know how to endure_.)

Cassian sat up, pushed himself closer to his console, opened the programs he needed to run to covertly collect the data he reviewed.

One more report.

 

Sachee walked too close to Cassian from the elevator to his grey door after the work shift. He practically hovered at Cassian's elbow, and in the walls his reflection seemed fixated on the back of Cassian's head. Cassian ignored him. The slave said nothing anyway, made no attempt to draw attention or ask if Cassian was prepared to follow through on his promise. Raeth was quiet as well, muttering only a half-hearted “Night, sir,” as they left Cassian at his door. Even his trailing ghosts seemed oddly subdued, floating in their wakes in every polished grey surface without the usual jittery bounce of Lieutenant Raeth or the constant red glint of Sachee’s eyes sweeping around the corridor, marking everything he saw with deliberate care.

Cassian pushed into his quarters without bothering to respond to either of them, to any of it, and crossed to his datapad, still on the bed where he had thrown it this morning.

The light was dark.

He refreshed his inbox anyway.

Nothing.

 

 

 

 

Nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cassian pulled off his jacket, his boots, his trousers, and then kept going, suddenly needing the grey material _off_ , needing to feel the bite of the cool recycled air, needing to see the ghost in the wall as a man and not a fragment. He stripped to his skin and glowered at the man who appeared in the wall, ghostly and grey but whole. At least he was whole.

He sat on the grey bed and stared at the grey ghost, and by his side the grey datapad was silent, dark.

He picked it up.

Set it down.

Picked it up again, attached the datadrive that he had filled today. One last report.

It took him roughly twenty minutes to compile and send the report. He didn’t bother to attached a personal assessment to this one; he barely remembered anything he had seen that day. Perhaps this would be the most valuable packet of data he had grabbed on the whole mission. Perhaps it would be as useless as public voting polls from the old Republic. He didn’t know.

She was a good fighter, with excellent instincts. She kept proximity sensors around the U-Wing when in port, and routinely sliced into the security holocams.

She was smart, and skilled, and she wouldn’t leave without him.

Cassian stood up.

Sat back down.

Grey reflections in the walls, moving just in the corner of his eye.

The chrono on the wall glowed white against the black background. Cassian noted the time and did a quick conversion in his head. He shivered as he realized that even if she wrote him back, right now, and sent it, it would be too late. They were past the point when she could safely reply to messages and expect him to receive them. There was still the chance that she had written him something already, that he would receive something tomorrow, his last day on-world. But he left early on the day after, and anything sent now would arrive too late.

He could still send _her_ a message, though. She would receive it. If she could. If she was still up there.

If she was alive.

Cassian braced his elbows on his knees, buried his face in his hands, and made himself breathe.

Just breathe.

Then he picked up the datapad and opened a message window.

\--

Subj: Be safe

To: Wyla

From: Korr

I don’t know what happened, if you are alright. ~~I am so afraid that something has gone wrong and you are~~ If you receive this, I know you cannot answer. It is unfair, I think, to send this to you and give you no time to answer, but ~~if you are not even~~ I cannot sit down here in silence.

Perhaps I am a coward for waiting until there is such a chance that you will not see them, but I meant to tell you in person, and now fear that I cannot.

And I cannot let these things go unsaid.

I have always been distant, it’s easier. Cleaner. Safer. You know that, I think. You have been that way too. ~~I see it sometimes in your face, when people get close,~~ And I have  liked it, ~~Jyn,~~ or at least wanted it, wanted to be distant. Safe.

I don’t think I want it any more. Not entirely. Not since you asked me to trust you. Not since you threw yourself into danger to save a galaxy that sneered at you. Not since you stayed. ~~No one has ever stayed befo~~

The distance has damaged me, too. I’ve always known that. It’s never been a problem. It was just the way things were, the way I had to be to make all the rest of it worthwhile. Just the way ~~the rebellion~~ my work needed me to be. Now I keep finding these little obstacles, like firewalls inside my own head, things that lock me down when I want to move forward. Self-imposed chains, how stupid, yes? But they are there, and I can’t seem to break them. I can’t even talk about them, ~~because to talk is to fail~~ but I want to.

I have wanted to tell you so many things for so long, and yet I can never seem to say them. I can’t say how waking up to see you in the medbay after ~~Scarif~~ I was injured altered my whole life, not just what it was but how I saw it, how I felt it, how I lived it. I can’t say how I’ve wanted a partner for so long but truly believed that I could never have one, until you walked in and told the whole ~~briefing~~ room that you were mine. I can’t say how I almost fell over from surprise in that moment, dizzy with the shock and the joy. I can’t say how walking into my quarters when you are there is like coming home. The words are there, lodged inside my head, but trying to pull them free only breaks them into pieces, and there I stand, with nothing left to give you.

~~Perhaps it is true that I am too dama~~

~~In my psych evals I always lie when they ask~~

~~If I had nothing to give, would you~~

I am afraid that I have nothing to give you.

After ~~Scarif~~ we met, I remember that ~~Bodhi~~ your brother kept asking if you were staying and I could only lie there and wait for your answer ~~with my heart in my throa~~. Do you remember the third night after I woke up, the night you walked into my room and climbed into my bed and we never said a word? I wanted to tell you that it was the first time in months I could remember sleeping a whole ~~shift~~ night through. I wanted to tell you that you burned away any last shreds of my fear and doubt, and for at least a few precious hours, you made me clean again in a way I haven’t been clean in a long, long time. Do you remember that in the morning I asked you to stay, and you said yes? I sometimes regret asking you. I am so fucking happy you stayed, but I was so selfish to ask. You let me hold you, and you asked for nothing in return, and the next morning I offered you a life of violence ~~in the shadows~~ , because that’s all I had to offer.

It wasn’t enough, I know this. I know. But I offered it and you stayed, and you gave me some measure of peace. I would give you that, too, give you peace, give you somewhere to feel safe, if only I knew how. And it is still selfish and I am still so sorry, but I am going to ask again, and keep asking, maybe for the rest of my life, however much of it I have left.

Stay with me.

Stay with me, and I will try to be more than just another part of the war. For you, I will try.

It has now been thirty-seven hours. I still have not heard from you, and I don’t know what’s happened, if you are hurt or captured. If you are simply sleeping or dead.

 ~~no te mueras, por fa~~

It is agonizing, not to know. It is just as agonizing to hope that you get this message as it is to fear that you never will, because you might receive it and not feel anything like I do, might want to leave ~~me~~. I would understand if you did, I promise, but there is a part of me that hopes you will stay even if you do not want ~~me~~ for us to be anything other than reliable partners.

I cannot help but hope. I hope you are alive. I hope you are safe. I hope that you will be waiting when I finally get away from this shithole and back to you.

I hope you stay.

Please be safe.

[Delete Message Y/N?]

\--

Cassian read through the message again, checking automatically for security breaches, for words or phrases or names that might trigger an Imperial censor in the Certh server.

Then he read it again, just to look at it, just to see the mess of his imperfect, poorly raised, touch-starved, blood-splattered and oh, so fucking _tired_ heart. There it was, in all it’s selfish, emotional, rambling glory, sprawled across the screen in dark grey letters, bleeding and worn and ugly and all he had to offer her in whatever crisis she was facing up there, alone.

Maybe it would repulse her.

Maybe it would comfort her.

Maybe it would simply echo through the looping void of Certh’s archives, unread, forgotten, until a slave took pity and erased the last fragment of Cassian Andor from the galaxy.

He hit the send key, and the datapad flashed red. _Message sent, receipt unknown._

Tomorrow Cassian would sit in his grey office and let data files scroll randomly through his console, not bothering to record anything, and tomorrow night he would survive the long, dark silence of the Archive, and the morning after that, he would escape this nightmare planet with a potential new recruit for the Alliance. Tomorrow, tomorrow night, the morning after. If he was lucky, he would survive. If he was lucky, he would escape.

And, if there was any grace in this galaxy for Cassian Andor, he would have a partner waiting for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've never actually written a real love letter before. It shows, but then, I can just say that Cassian has never written one either, so that's alright.
> 
> Please let me know if my Spanish is messed up. I tried to translate "the Force of others" and it was hard to figure out what was the right form.


	5. once you know you can never go back

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know, I’m a little disappointed no one called me out on the Cassian’s huge math error in the last chapter. When he received Jyn’s fragmented message, he fired off two rapid messages within about 10 minutes of each other, and worked in his head that Jyn would receive the second message almost 4 hours after the first…because he flipped the math and forgot that he was the one living at the faster time, not Jyn. A day for Cassian = less than 2 hours for Jyn. In her part of reality, she would have received those messages simultaneously. You know, if she received them.  
> Anyway, I can’t believe you guys let me get away with that one.

[Day 70 / The Certh Imperial Archives]

[Day 4 / The Shift]

[Day 0 / 1627 GST / Galactic Standard Calendar]

* * *

 Cassian stands in the elevator and watches the light flash across Jyn’s face.

It’s quiet, in the elevator.

In the elevator, there is no war, no mission, no fight.

Jyn’s eyes flash green, fade to shadowed grey, then green again. Light, green, grey. Light, green, grey. Grey shapes move in the walls behind her, but Cassian watches Jyn. She’s quiet, but her silence is not the same as his. His silence scratches at him from the inside, dark seeds planted in his childhood, his youth, his long years as a field operative. It presses outward, swallowing all the sound of the world outside, of the battle, the war, his war. Hers is simply…quiet. She tilts her chin, just a little, a challenge, a promise, a private joke he can almost remember, and Cassian strains to hear her breathing. He thinks, for a moment, that he can.

Light, green, grey, light, green, grey, a silent heartbeat.

He can’t hear his heartbeat.

There are thorns growing in his skin.

Green, grey, green. If he can just speak her name, maybe he can join her in her soft green quiet.

The elevator walls hum, and flash purple.

Jyn looks down at the silent thorns as they tear through his skin and tangle around his arms, his legs, his throat. In the grey walls of the elevator, he can see the ghostly shadow of a man moving, stretching his arms out towards Jyn, a mirror to Cassian’s own reaching hands. But the ghost can’t touch her through the grey metal, and the grey thorns are wrapping ever thicker around his body, pulling his arms in, slicing into his skin. His vision begins to sharpen at the edges, silent grey points closing in, but if he could just speak her name, just speak his own, he might break free, he might be alive, just speak, just speak, just speak.

Jyn’s eyes are green between the thorns.

Cassian opens his mouth, but the thorns flash purple, humming - they wind round his tongue, and he is

silent.

* * *

 

 

Cassian woke up. The walls were humming, painful violet light flashing through the circuits embedded in the metal, obscuring his grey ghost behind the ugly semi-light and relentless, tooth-rattling noise. Then the hum and the purple light faded, and the ghost re-emerged, just a disembodied grey head and two cold grey hands floating in the grey void of the grey walls. He had slept in his grey uniform last night, his last night on grey Certh.

Which was probably a good thing, because he was running late.

He turned his head, looked at the grey datapad sitting next to the grey bed. No light.

Of course there was no light.

A pounding knock on the door. Major Korr needed to get up. He needed to report to his shuttle. He needed to file his report. Cassian waited dully for Raeth’s voice to filter through, _Morning, Major_ , and he could guess how bad Raeth would be today (how loud the night had been) by the length of the last word, _Maaaaaaaaajor_.

Except all he heard in the hallway was silence.

Silence?

His heart stabbed suddenly in his chest, and Cassian scrambled to his feet, his hand groping for his blaster.

Another knock, this one quiet, precise. “Major Korr,” a high-pitched voice called through the metal door. “It is time to report for outprocessing, sir.”

Sachee. Sachee was knocking at his door. But that first knock had been Raeth, hadn’t it? The same knock for the last seventy days, same drawling call to arms, same reminder of who he was pretending to be, who he _must_ be to survive. But today it was different, the last day, the last call, and Cassian suddenly had a vision of himself opening to door to see Raeth no more than a ghost in the walls and Sachee standing with a squad of stormtroopers.

For a brief moment, Cassian considered the viewport behind him. It was made of hardened grey metallic glass, but brittle enough that the blaster could shoot through it, one bolt of green fire to set him free. He might get a few tiers up before someone shot him off the side of the grey pyramid. He might get near a shuttle before armored white hands grabbed hold of him and he pulled the little red pill from the lapel of his grey jacket.

_I will try to be more than just another part of the war. For you, I will try_.

Cassian gripped the blaster tight, and walked to the door.

Sachee stood calmly in the middle of the doorframe, his grey face sober as he watched with glinting red eyes. Behind him, Raeth leaned against the wall, so still that for a short, terrible moment he looked like he was actually within it (ghosts moving in the corner of Cassian’s eye, just at the level with his head), but then the man looked up and waved vaguely, as real as Cassian.

For whatever that was worth.

“You must report to outprocessing in twenty minutes, Major Korr,” Sachee said, his voice grating across Cassian’s ears but still a relief from the thorny silence that still echoed under his skin. The Neimoidian swept a judgmental look down Cassian’s rumpled jacket, his uncombed hair and haggard face. “I would suggest…” he paused delicately, “haste.”

“I am assigned to show you to your designated shuttle,” Raeth said into the lingering silence almost crisply, his face blank for a moment before he suddenly laughed, as if he had just told an exceedingly funny joke. “If you will follow me, Major,” he added cheerfully.

_Major_. Short, sharp, no mocking drawl, no overt menace. Just an officer reporting to his superior.

His superior who needed to get his act together or he would invalidate months of work and suffering at the last moment.

Cassian turned on his heel and stalked back into his grey room. He grabbed the datapad first, wiped it, wiped it again, and then dropped it on the grey floor and smashed it with his boot. The shattered device went into the garbage chute. In the walls, he saw Sachee’s red eyes dip over his shoulder, a nod of acknowledgement. The datapad would be cleaned up by Certh’s slaves. Erased _. (It is a terrible thing, sir_ , Sachee told him sadly, _to be erased.)_

(But necessary. Major Aldin Korr existed so Cassian Andor could live. Cassian Andor vanished so Major Korr could _work_.)

He straightened his grey jacket, smoothed the grey pleats, tugged the grey gloves over his (greyish) hands. His boots were polished to a high shine last night and stood ready for him by the bedside. Something in the way the weighted heels were shaped forced his spine to straighten to an almost painful rigidity, giving him the familiar stiff movements of an Imperial upper officer. Major Korr rolled his shoulders and ignored the faint pangs in his lower back, remnants of another man’s injuries. A quick comb of his hair (dark, but washed out and dull in the grey-cast lights of the Imperial Archive’s standardized light fixtures) into something resembling a regulation style. Major Korr looked neat and presentable in two minutes flat – with one small detail.

He picked up the grey razor and clipped his goatee neatly around the edges. Facial hair was allowed within specific parameters for higher order officers, but it was considered unfashionable, a sign that the officer was not wholly in synch with Coruscanti sensibilities. Major Aldin Korr, a good Imperial soldier, did not see much point in wearing any facial hair.

(Cassian Andor never shaved his face bare if he could help it.)

Major Korr eyed himself in the grey mirror, ignoring the ghosts drifting over his grey-clad shoulder in the hallway, in the far grey walls. The dark goatee was stark against his grey face.

He set the razor down and ran his hand over his chin, feeling the scrape of the hair through the gloves, muted by the fabric. Behind him, Sachee folded his hands behind his back and inclined his head marginally. He dropped his hand and wondered if it was a gesture of understanding, or impatience, and renewed his mental note to look up Neimoidian body language later. (If he made it back to the Alliance.)

(Jyn would be angry at the uncertainty of that thought, but he refused to think “when” until he knew what had happened to her. If Jyn wasn’t waiting for him up there, “when” became immaterial and irrelevant.)

He turned back to the Neimoidian, expecting the slave to shift back from the doorframe to make way. To his temporary surprise, Sachee merely stood still, his hands hidden behind his back, his eyes fixed on the major’s face. Ah. Right.

Korr lifted his chin to look over Sachee’s grey shoulder and picked out Raeth’s real face amid all the blurred reflections. “Lieutenant,” he said in the clear, sharp tone of an Imperial officer addressing an underling. “With me.”

Raeth snapped into formal attention, his shoulders stiff, his expression making the subtle shift from the drifting blankness of daydreaming to the sharp blankness of a correct military thousand yard stare. “Yes, Major.”

Sachee slowly stepped aside to leave a clear path out the door.

“To outprocessing,” Major Korr ordered, and lead the grey ghosts down the hall.

 

* * *

 

 

The ensign on duty was young, thin as a rail, and stood at attention with such rigidity that Major Korr could almost hear his boney frame creaking from the strain.

“Your shuttle is prepared, Major,” the ensign said as the inspector marched into the sparse grey outprocessing office next to the access doors leading to the landing pads. Korr kept his eyes firmly on the ensign’s pale face, ignoring the two stormtroopers flanking the door behind him. In the corner of his eye (just at the level of his head), he could see the grey shape of Sachee standing quietly, waiting. Raeth was…somewhere behind him, near the stormtroopers. The man was stiff, formal, fully within regulation for an officer. But there was a light in his eye that crept up Korr’s spine, and had he more leeway, he would turn and snap at the man. He would order him to march away, order him to _leave_ before that little warning light flared up into madness and scorched them all.

But he did not have that leeway, so he kept his face forward and his mouth shut.

A grey datapad shook slightly in the ensign’s gloved hand, betraying his nervousness, but the boy held his free hand over it and said, with the great care of someone who had practiced the words and knew that failing to present them correctly would result in terrible punishment, “Sir, I am prepared to record your assessment.”

The Neimoidian slave shifted his weight. One of the stormtroopers did the same, the clank of his plas-steel armor underscoring the soft shuffling of the slave’s robes.

Before Cassian’s eyes, time split, two halves peeling apart and unfurling before him.

In the first, Major Korr gave the Certh Archive a poor evaluation, detailing inappropriate use of data (evidence of which he had been careful to gather in the long hours in his office, proof of officers wasting time on media holonet sites, enlisted soldiers sneaking server time for holovids or games). Major Korr noted the inefficient management of resources (break times exceeding ten minute intervals, slaves assigned as aides to lower-order officers – the inspector didn’t need examples for this particular charge but he had plenty at the ready, just in case).

In this reality, Major Korr branded the Certh Archives with a terrible rating, and then vanished into the protective shell of Imperial bureaucracy, smoke in the wind. The Archive would be placed under a formal Unit Readiness Assessment, an administrative freeze placed on the planet as offices on distant Core worlds ran the required paperwork through their individual chains of command and authorization, taking five to eight business days for each signature required, every triplicate form and seal of approval needed. A team of evaluators (real ones, from the actual Imperial Quality Assurance Command) would invade the Archives to place every aspect of the Archives’ leadership and personnel under an unforgiving microscope. Supplies would no longer come to Certh until the “inefficient use of resources” charge was cleared. Paychecks would no longer be issued to any Imperial in the Archive’s command. Medical services would be limited to emergency use only, with an understanding that any utilization of those services would cost the individual out of pocket. The Archive uploads would stop, data feeds would back up across the Empire, unable to archive and process their data in the usual manner. Servers on Core and Inner Rim worlds would likely be merely inconvenienced, but everywhere from the Mid Rim out would become that much more vulnerable to slicing attempts, data theft, and shortages of processing power as they struggled to keep their data stored properly, their forms filed and their own requests, orders, and paycheck systems running smoothly.

Extreme measures would be taken to keep the Archive at least working at minimal capacity, but it would still be slower, weaker, and cause a backlash throughout the whole system. And none would suffer more than Certh itself; if it took the Empire a month to sort Certh’s issues (a fast response, for such a large, unwieldy system), that would translate to over a year of pain for the Archive. And a resource freeze would mean no transfers in or out of the command here. Every officer and stormtrooper on planet would be trapped here, as Raeth was trapped.

As Major Korr (as Cassian) had been trapped.

In the other timeline, the other choice, Cassian rated Certh Archives “satisfactory,” the report was lodged somewhere in the Quality Assurance offices, and promptly forgotten forever. Business continued as usual on Certh, and in the Empire in general.

(If Jyn was d- if they had Jyn in custody, it would be harder to break her out without the covering chaos of a bad performance evaluation.)

“Sir?” The ensign’s hand wavered slightly over the datapad, his eyes locked somewhere over Cassian’s shoulder. Probably staring at Raeth’s entourage of ghosts. No, wait, Sachee was standing just behind Cassian on that side; possibly his red eyes had caught the ensign’s attention.

The blowback from a bad rating would create openings for the Alliance to exploit across the galaxy (it would create openings for him to find Jyn, if she was caught, if she was still - )

Someone shifted their weight behind him, the soft rustle of grey robes against grey skin. ( _We erased you,_ Sachee brought his hands suddenly around to his chest, and held them, palms up as if in supplication. _For this, I ask your forgiveness.)_

The Imperials on Certh would suffer under a bad evaluation – but they wouldn’t suffer the worst.

“What do you say, Major,” Raeth said suddenly from behind him. “Let the devils dance, or burn it to the ground?”

The ensign startled, his gaze shifting from behind Cassian’s left shoulder to behind his right, where no doubt Raeth was lounging against the wall near the stormtroopers.  He gave a weak, uncertain smile to the lieutenant, a subordinate uncomfortably laughing at a superior officer’s tasteless joke. His eyes flicked to Cassian (to Major Korr) and then flicked away just as fast, skittish. Afraid. Major Korr showed no sign of noticing the ensign’s fear. (Cassian dug his toes into the hard soles of his stiff Imperial boots, hard enough to feel a distracting ache radiating up his foot and into his calf.)

The moment crystallized around him, cold and empty and endless.

Two new images in his head, split and peeled apart before him: Jyn, glowering at him in the dim light of the Imperial shuttle, her eyes rimmed red and her clothes sodden, _you might as well be a stormtrooper_ , her words like sharp daggers slipping through his ribs. On the other side, Jyn, smiling at him in the gentle light of the U-Wing, her eyes lined with black and her fingers light on his jaw, _thief_ , her whisper a reminder that the uniform he wore did not define him.

Cassian cleared his throat. “Satisfactory,” he said sharply.

The ensign’s shoulders dropped. Sachee shifted his weight again. Raeth barked a short, sharp laugh.

“Very good, sir,” the ensign said, tapping quickly at his datapad. “Your shuttle is ready for departure at your leisure, sir.”

The Imperial Inspector nodded, turned to face the men (and the ghosts) behind him.

Sachee stood peacefully near the door, just to the left of the stormtroopers, his hands folded in his robe and his face impassive. Raeth leaned one shoulder against the wall (a ghostly blurred head floated alongside his own, watching through indistinct eyes).

“Lieutenant,” Major Korr snapped. “You are hereby transferred to Quality Assurance Command, Coruscant, under my direct authority. Your identity cylinder and personal codes will be adjusted to reflect this change of command upon arrival at our destination. Do you understand?”

Raeth looked at Sachee, who did not turn his head to meet the lieutenant’s gaze, but his red eyes flicked closed for a long beat, and then opened again.

Raeth pushed himself upright. “Yes, Major,” he said coolly. “Understood.”

“I don’t see the lieutenant’s transfer orders in the system, sir,” the ensign frowned at his datapad, but the moment Major Korr glanced over his shoulder at the young man, he jumped and hit the screen earnestly. “But of course I will clear it through immediately. I do see the form is in the request queue, I imagine someone up at Admin has just fallen a bit behind on their in-box, it will probably clear in an hour or on it’s own. Of course there’s no need to wait!” he rushed to add before the major could even lift an eyebrow. “I’ll just…and, _there,_ ” he turned the datapad around to show the officers the screen, practically glowing with his eager desire to be helpful. “Done, and processed. The lieutenant is cleared to access the shuttle with you, sir. Thank you, sir. Have a safe ride back to civili- uh, back to The Shift and your, uh, normal duty station. Sirs.”

The door behind the ensign slid open. The young man helpfully stepped aside, clearing the path outside into Certh’s weak blue-grey light and the gunmetal grey shuttle squatting on the nearest launch pad like a monotone brick. The whine of the modified engines on the specialized shuttle echoed slightly off the metal surface of the Archive’s stepped pyramid.

Major Korr marched forward, Lieutenant Raeth a step behind, and he tried not to think too hard about the flashes of hands and faces floating along underneath his feet, his exposed skin reflecting in the metal paneling beneath his shiny black boots. He tried not to feel too relieved that the two stormtroopers stayed back in the outprocessing office.

“Wait,” Raeth said suddenly, in a low voice that the shuttle engine almost buried. There was a brittle edge to it, and it took Major Korr a moment to realize that Raeth had stopped walking a few steps back and was turned away, looking back over his shoulder. It took a moment longer to realize that Sachee had not followed them out onto the launch pad.

The slave stood just inside the open doorway to the office, his grey robes stirring slightly in the breeze generated by the shuttle’s exhaust, his grey hands clasped neatly behind his back, his grey face unreadable as ever. He seemed to be forged from the same grey metal as the pyramid itself, inscrutable, reflecting only pieces of what he saw back into the world, and laced through with the secrets of the Empire. Only the red of his eyes gave any sign of organic life, flicking from Raeth to the shuttle to the officer leading the way to their escape.

“Lieutenant,” Major Korr said sternly. Now was not the time to cause some kind of scene. The dark grey shuttle was ready to depart. The curious ensign was peering through the open door over the slave’s shoulder. At least three shiny grey security cams were visible from the launchpad. They were on a schedule, and the Empire did not appreciate a disrupted schedule. They had no time for Raeth’s antics.

(He had someone he needed to find. There was no _time_.)

“Wait,” the Imperial said again, that same tone, his white gloved hands clenched tightly as he looked at the motionless grey slave behind him. There was no twisted smile on his thin lips, no sardonic drawl in his voice, no vagueness in his grey eyes. He simply looked…small. Uncertain. He took another small step toward the shuttle as if driven by instinct, but then he paused again, still looking back at the open door. At the slave framed by the metal doorframe.

“Raeth,” Cassian said slowly. “It’s time to go.”

Sachee dipped his chin, and then, briefly, raised one hand and touched the side of his chin. It was a quick gesture, possibly he was just scratching an itch on his face, a passing motion. It meant nothing to Major Korr, and neither the curious ensign nor the two stormtroopers reacted at all.

Raeth swallowed. He lifted one white gloved hand and scratched his ashen cheek with one finger in a vague imitation of Sachee’s movement. Then he turned, walked onto the shuttle, and sat stiffly in the nearest seat.

Major Korr boarded the shuttle behind Raeth and slid into the seat across the aisle, his black harness biting into his shoulders through the thick grey jacket of his uniform. The harness hadn’t hurt quite as badly on the way down, not that he recalled. But then, he’d lost three or four kilos during his time on Certh. Or he thought he had – the reflections in the walls had looked increasingly gaunt. Major Korr had taken his vitamin supplements scrupulously every day. Not that it mattered. He was leaving. It was time to leave.

(In his memory a medical droid jabbed his arm with a needle and announced loudly to his waiting superiors that Major Korr met required physical health standards. At the same time, he could almost feel a scarred but gentle hand running her fingertips down his cheek, tracing over his jawline to his throat, lingering on his pulse, checking that he was alright. A surge of panic shot up from his gut to his throat, his heart clenching in his chest; if the medical droid found his non-standard spinal implants, he might be caught, if Jyn wasn’t waiting for him on The Shift, he might be - )

He squeezed his eyes shut for a long moment, grabbed the two edges of his fragmented thoughts, and desperately tried to press them tightly back together into one timeline, one moment. _This_ moment. He wasn’t out yet. Jyn might be up there, waiting for him to find her. He needed to stay focused. This was not the time to let his mind wander down dark paths.

This was not the time.

Lieutenant Raeth was leaning forward in his seat, his face white, straining against the harness, staring out at the landing pad – no, at the door to the outprocessing office, which was now closed. Major Korr caught a glimpse of the dull grey metal door, and felt a dull surprise at the wavering reflection of a blurry face in the distant metal. He wondered if it was Raeth’s reflection, or his own, or – a sudden irrational stab of terror, _fuck_ , what if it was _Jyn,_ Jyn watching him leave her in this hellish prison, surrounded by the ghosts of everyone else he ever left behind, and Cassian felt the panic throbbing through his body now, tight in his throat and sour on his tongue and his hands fumbled with the harness straps because he had to go back, he had to check, he had to be _sure._

“He died.”

A grey body moved between Cassian’s face and the open shuttle door, and Cassian leaned back, startled, his hands still on the straps.

Raeth stood in the shuttle door, his black harness swinging in the seat, and his face was no longer pale. Cassian stared, thrown by the pink flush in Raeth’s face, the bright clarity in his grey eyes. Marion Raeth grinned at him, and then held up his hands in mocking submission. “He woke up one day and heard the screaming,” he said, and laughed, a gentle, amused sound that somehow carried perfectly over the dull roar of the shuttle.

“Lieutenant, sit down,” Major Korr ordered. “The shuttle is about to depart.”

Raeth didn’t even seem to hear him, though his eyes were fixed on his. “And it killed him, Major,” he said a touch sadly despite his smile. “He tried to stop it and it killed him and sent his ghost here.”

The shuttle jolted slightly, the landing pad’s grav-locks unlatching, one of the last steps prior to launch. The lieutenant staggered as the grey floor shifted beneath his boots. “Sit down!” Cassian barked.

Raeth spread his hands a little further, humorous and helpless, then let them fall. “I still can’t stop it, not even here, but I can,” he shook his head, and took a deliberate step back, his heels perilously close to the edge of the shuttle. “I can listen.”

“Raeth,” Cassian’s fingers felt stiff and cold as he forced his harness straps off again. “I can’t come back,” he said harshly, the words slicing through his mouth like razor blades, the terror strangling him as he spoke. “I can’t come back for you. Sit down.”

The man nodded solemnly. “Be safe,” he said, and smiled again.

Cassian lunged.

Raeth stepped back.

The shuttle shuddered, and rose.

Cassian’s hand closed on empty air. He jerked it back just as the grey shuttle door snapped closed in front of him, and a ghostly face with bared teeth and dark eyes snarled at him from centimeters away. He stumbled back with a shout, collapsing painfully into his seat as the shuttle shook and rattled around him, entering the distortion field over the planet.

Cassian dug his heels into the grey carpet of the shuttle and wedged himself into his seat, gripping the arm rests and slamming his eyes closed. Breathe. Breathe. The shuttle doors had eblerite in them, he had only seen his own reflection. He had done his part to get Raeth out. Sachee couldn’t fault him, and couldn’t turn him in now anyway. By the time the order came up from Certh to The Shift, Major Korr would be gone. _Cassian Andor_ would be gone.

Unless Jyn was –

No.

_No._

They would go home.

_They would go home._

The shuttle jerked, and Cassian felt himself fly up and then slam back into the chair, his spine aching at the impact, his fingers throbbing as he tightened them around the armrests. Major Korr’s gloves were slippery, so he risked raising one to his teeth and yanking the material off, then switching hands, pulling off the other. He let the gloves fall to the deck, and pressed himself as hard into the seat as he could.

Another harsh jolt, another spike of pain down his lower back, down the implants in his spine. Implants that the Alliance had given him, after Scarif. After he had fought Imperials on Scarif. After he had fallen, and climbed, and Jyn had carried him out again. Jyn had carried him to the beach, then to the shuttle, (more jolting, more pain, it hadn’t been this bad last time but he wasn’t thinking about it because there were already too many timelines playing in his head and he just couldn’t afford another, he couldn’t) and then she had carried him off the shuttle and into the medical personnel’s waiting arms on Yavin, and she had been there when he woke up, she had stayed, she had agreed to be Cassian’s partner. (The shuttle creaked and groaned around him, his unclipped harness strap swung out and smacked him in the cheek, but it didn’t hurt nearly as bad as the blaster wound in his side, as the fractured ribs and vertebrae, so he ignored it). Jyn had stayed and she had travelled to Certh with him, and she liked tea and knew how to rob music stores and she had made a friend of a farming droid when she was little. She was his partner. Cassian Andor had a partner.

(The shuttle shook violently, like an animal shaking itself after swimming, and then, suddenly - )

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, I'm sorry! This chapter was over 10,000 words long before I decided to split it a bit. The last (actual, no shit, really honestly _last_ ) chapter will be out in a day or two. I just need to polish it up.


	6. and then it's born again

Cassian opened his eyes. The shuttle glided smoothly through the darkness, and outside his portal he could see the grey-blue curve of the planet. From this distance, it looked peaceful. The painful rattling and bumping had eased, the stabbing pain in his spine now a mere uncomfortable ache. He forced his jaw to relax and loosened his death grip on the armrests. In the portal on the opposite side of the shuttle, just above the empty grey chair, a space station shaped like a large monochrome ring slid into view. Scarif’s gate.

 _No._ The Shift.

Jyn.

“Apologies, sir,” a tinny voice buzzed through an intercom next to his headrest. “The distortion was unusually strong that time,” the pilot informed him, sounding bored. “Hope you had your harness on back there.” A faint scratch of static as the pilot cut off the intercom, and then silence. Silence and Cassian’s harsh breathing.

Slowly, he pushed himself upright in the chair.

The shuttle turned, the planet vanished from his view, and then the darkness on either side filled slowly with the grey exterior of The Shift, which gave way rapidly to the blinding white interior of the docking bays. Cassian blinked, his eyes straining against the sudden brightness. He had forgotten that the bays were relentlessly white, interrupted only by the grey of the eblerite airlock doors and silvery viewports embedded all down the curving walls.

The closest viewport lined up briefly with the shuttle as they drifted into dock, and he leaned forward against the harness to peer through it. Stormtroopers marched sharply past the viewport, black slashes in their armor punctuating the unrelieved white, heavy black rifles pointed down at the smooth white deck beneath their boots.

No dark leather jacket, no tightly-bound brown hair, no green eyes. No Jyn. Cassian felt his jaw clench again, small fractured memories competing to cut his heart to shreds. Raeth holding up gloved hands in a helpless gesture as he dropped from the shuttle deck and back into Certh’s deadly embrace ( _it killed him, Major, he woke up and heard the screams_ ). A blinking green light on a grey datapad, proof that he was not alone ( _yes I’m still reading all your messages, this weird time thing sucks, stay safe, someone I cared about fell_ ). Jyn standing in front of him by the eblerite airlock and shrugging her shoulders ( _it will pass the time, Major)._

_Are you still_

The shuttle bumped gently, and then the whine of the engines spooled down. They had docked.

Cassian shot out of his seat, hand outstretched to hit the emergency release button on the shuttle door. At the last moment, he slowed, stopped, closed his eyes. Took a deep breath.

The Shift was Imperial territory, just as treacherous as Certh itself. Cassian Andor wouldn’t survive it. Cassian Andor wouldn’t be able to rescue Jyn, if she were caught somewhere on this station. Cassian Andor wouldn’t even be able to _find_ her, if it came to that.

Major Aldin Korr could.

Major Aldin Korr. Imperial officer. Data quality inspector.

( _Thief_.)

He swiped his discarded grey gloves from the floor, straightened his grey jacket, locked his hands behind his back, and wiped his face clean of any expression just in time for the shuttle doors to slide open. “The nearest exit from the Interior Docks is to your right, sir,” the bored pilot buzzed over the comm.

The whiteness of the hallways was brighter than it looked through the viewports, so bright that his eyes hurt almost immediately and he had to struggle not to squint. The stormtroopers’ white armor almost blended into the walls – of course they did, of course, of fucking _course_ , he was off Certh but the ghosts still followed him everywhere, _Welcome to Hell, Major_ – and it made every nerve in his body vibrate with tension, but he couldn’t show it.

Major Korr strode off the grey shuttle and into the white hallways as if he had no care in the world. His uniform scraped and grated at his skin, the tight grey collar choking his throat, the boots heavy on his feet, but he gave no indication of discomfort. His gloved hands were slick inside the grey cloth, but he took care not to clench them into fists. Around him, five stormtroopers in sweep formation stopped abruptly and the leader saluted with his rifle. Major Korr swept past them without so much as a glance.

The exit that led from the Interior Docks out to the commercial section of The Shift was a small grey office with only one small square viewport that would have shown a fragment of the bustling commercial hallways, except it was blocked by a dingy grey privacy shade. It looked nothing like the checkpoint he had crossed to get into the Docks, months (days) ago. The nervous beige-furred Bothan manning the desk, however, looked somewhat familiar. Or perhaps it was simply the grey slave robes they wore, and the careful way they did not quite look him in the eye.

“Inspector,” the Bothan said in a shaky voice as Major Korr approached. “Welcome back, sir. Your documents here, please, sir.” They pointed a pale finger at the scanner embedded in the desk, and Major Korr did not look at the old, grey scar tissue around their beige wrists. He did not look at the naked terror in the Bothan’s dark eyes as they hunkered before the grey uniform. The slave’s fears and trials were immaterial to Major Aldin Korr.

(Cassian would throw up later, when it was safe, when Major Korr was no longer necessary. But this was not that time.)

He unclipped his scandoc chip from his belt and pressed it against the scanner. The console nearby chirped, and the Bothan hurried to tap on the grey screen, clearly struggling not to glance back at the grey Imperial who loomed silently by his desk.

Major Korr cleared his throat. He had, after all, one more purpose before Cassian threw him away. “My hireling,” he said in as calm and soothing a voice as he dared. The Bothan still flinched. “The woman hired to transport me from The Shift,” Major Korr gave up on gentleness and let his voice turn clipped, impatient. “She was instructed to meet me at the docking bay.”

The Bothan turned a shade paler, somehow, and nodded. “Yes, sir. Yes, she was.”

Was. _Was_. Cassian’s insides withered and shrank inside him.

The Bothan coughed. “I mean, um, there has been a small change in plans…” his voice trailed off, his dark eyes darting to something over Major Korr’s shoulder.

The office lights went out, plunging the grey room into unrelenting darkness.

Something moved behind him, less a sound than a sensation against the back of his neck, and he caught the faintest flicker of movement from the corner of his eye, level with his head.

The terror he had been fighting down since he walked onto the launch pad on Certh exploded in his chest again, fracturing his vision, ghosts blooming in the dark grey walls, the faces of the grey dead reaching for his throat in the elevator and he whipped around with his arm raised. Someone caught his left wrist in a powerful grip, blocking his wild punch, but that just told him where his attacker was, so he compensated with his right hand, angling the blow for the attacker’s face.

His right fist whiffed through empty air, throwing him off balance. As he stumbled forward, he belatedly recognized the feeling of hair brushing against the underside of his forearm and realized that he had aimed too high, aimed for a face parallel with his own when the attacker was shorter, and fast, they were fast, darting forward and slamming their shoulder into his chest as they yanked his captured arm down –

\- and threw her other arm around his waist. “ _It’s me,”_ she hissed against his neck, and he froze.

Jyn.

_Jyn._

She was yanking him then, pulling him forward through the darkness and he heard a door slide open, distantly he was aware that the Bothan was saying something low and urgent and Jyn tossed something over his shoulder towards the slave, and then the door clicked shut behind him and a dim red light flipped on to reveal that he was in a small closet with Jyn pressed closed to him, her arm around his waist, her face turned up, and her eyes gleaming with reflected red light. The red light highlighted the curves of her face and plunged the dips and valleys into shadow. It made her look odd, a little unfinished, like a dream where his subconscious hadn’t quite filled in all the details. For a delirious moment, he thought he could feel the grey sheets of the grey bed bunching around his shoulders, the chill of Certh creeping into his bones and he knew, he _knew_ that he was still there, and any moment the red color will fade out and the grey thorns will climb back through his skin and strangle him awake.

Jyn leaned to look over his shoulder, making sure the door was closed firmly behind him. Her warmth brushed his chest, the faint scent of her hair derailing his panic and making him shiver with the contrast. “Jyn,” he whispered, and she shifted back on her heels to look up at him, her eyes flicking over his face, her mouth pressing into a thin line that usually meant she was worried. It was…a familiar expression.

A rush of relief swept over him; Cassian swallowed hard and closed his eyes for a brief moment. Real. He was off Certh. Jyn was here. Jyn was alive and unhurt and _here_.

He opened his eyes and then opened his mouth, a thousand questions, a thousand fears, a thousand thanks to the universe all about to tumble out, but before he could force any words through this dry throat, Jyn reached down and unclipped his belt. “Get this off,” she said under her breath, and then yanked the belt from his waist.

He blinked, stunned into silence.

She moved with swift efficiency, hanging the belt casually over her shoulder and grabbing his wrist, ripping one grey glove off his stiff fingers, then dropping it and grabbing the other, then finally reaching for his jacket buttons. The cold recycled station air bit into his skin as she pulled the jacket roughly off his shoulders. Her fingers scraped across his chest through the thin grey undershirt underneath as she also looped the jacket over her shoulder with his belt. Her skin glowed dull red, everything was red, he was probably finally losing his mind and Cassian gasped at the sensation of her warm fingers through the material, his heart pounding in his ears and his head so light that he was almost sure he was on the edge of passing out. Or the edge of insanity. Or both.

Jyn’s head jerked up at the sound, and whatever she saw in his face made her eyes go wide before she carefully pulled her hands away from him and held them up, palm facing him. “It’s okay,” she said in a low, careful voice. “We just – there’s no time – I need you to – “ She stopped, shook her head, and then looked him right in the eye and said quietly, “Trust me.” She shifted closer, and from this distance he could see the hint of green in her eyes that the red light mostly obscured. “ _Cassian_ ,” she whispered, and he broke.

He threw his arms around her, hauled her close, closed his eyes and just…just breathe. Just breathe. Gun oil, steel, the smell of clean air after a rainstorm, _Jyn_. She made a soft, surprised noise against his collarbone, her breath warm on his skin, her belt buckle digging into his gut and her hands clutching awkwardly at his thin grey shirt but he didn’t care, couldn’t care, _just breathe._

“It’s okay,” she said again into the hollow of his throat, but he could feel her heart beating against his chest, just as loud and fast as his own. “It’s okay, but we have to go. Cassian,” (he leaned a little harder into her embrace, into the sound of his _name_ ) “we have to _go._ ”

The urgency in her voice jolted through him as painfully as the shaking and banging of the shuttle had jolted through his spine, and Cassian jerked back. Too far, he thought hazily. Once again, he pushed too far. She probably thought he was – he was forcing something she probably wasn’t ready for, maybe he wasn’t really ready for, how the hells would he even know at this point and – _mierda_.

The curse in his native tongue, in his - Cassian Andor’s - first language, felt better than it should have, even in the privacy of his mind. He focused on that, on a long stream of profanity in both his native tongue and a few other languages that he had carefully avoided thinking about while he was down _there_ , because running every curse he could remember through his head was infinitely preferable to watching Jyn’s hesitance as she knelt to pull off his black boots. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the gleam of red light in her dark hair, though, couldn’t quite stop himself from shivering as the cold ran over his increasingly vulnerable skin. Jyn gathered up the jacket, the belt, the boots, and then pointed at his trousers. “Those too,” she murmured, and then sidled to his side, turning her face to the door and giving him as much privacy as possible in the small space.

Cassian shoved the scratchy grey trousers off with more concern for the tension in her face than any sense of dignity. More questions caught in his throat, but no, she was right, whatever was happening was clearly time sensitive, she needed his trust and he needed –

He needed –

He handed her the trousers, and was faintly relieved when she reached back and tugged a small black bag from the corner of the closet-sized space that he hadn’t noticed at first. She gave him a brief, faint smirk and tossed the bag into his arms. “Clothes,” she said softly. “Can’t let you walk around The Shift naked.”

Then she slipped out the door, and Cassian slammed his palm against the wall next to him and forced himself to breathe, breathe, she wasn’t gone, he wasn’t trapped. The bag, he had to – there was clothes in the bag. In the bag. Get a grip, Major Ko- no, that was wrong. Major Korr had just been torn to pieces and carried out in Jyn’s arms. Jyn had not hugged Major Korr. She would have killed Major Korr for touching her. (She had allowed Cassian to hug her. She had…she had hugged him back. Whatever her feelings about it, about him, he owed her for her tolerance.)

_Breathe, Cassian. Breathe._

The bag had a pair of dark brown work trousers, heavy brown boots, a light-colored shirt that he thought was blue but in the reddish light looked a bit purple, and a dark blue jacket. There was also a dark-colored scarf that the red light made the color hard to identify, and thick brown belt. Cassian pulled all the clothes on, marveling at the sensation of synth cotton and leather against his skin again, nothing like the heavy starched wool of the uniform. His hands were still cold, clammy with nerves and uncertainty. For a terrible, disorienting moment, he almost wished for the grey gloves back, something to shield his hands from the overwhelming sensation of the world against his fingers. He swiped them down his thighs and then cracked the door cautiously open.

Jyn was several steps away with her back to him, standing before the Bothan at the desk and blocking the slave from Cassian’s view. The lights were back on out there, the beige Bothan nervously twiddling their grey sleeve as they peered around the edge of the grey privacy screen on the viewport.

Another man stood next to Jyn, a Human, roughly Cassian’s height, roughly the same weight, dark hair cut neatly, even a dark goatee –

Oh.

Jyn handed the stranger a credit chip and then the pile of Imperial clothes, and the man wasted no time throwing the jacket over his own shoulders. Cassian’s heart constricted. Oh, _Jyn._ Something had happened, she didn’t feel safe, so she was smuggling him off the station and planting a false lead for anyone trailing them. Judging by the careful way she had handed the look-alike the credit chip, she had just given the stranger a great sum of credits to get his cooperation. And it explained the blackout and the closet - she had made sure that the look-alike did not see Cassian’s face.

The look-alike stripped and changed into the Imperial uniform without any apparent concern for interruptions, or his audience, reconstructing Major Aldin Korr right before Cassian’s eyes ( _grey reflection in the walls, moving just in the corner of his eye, level with his head)_ and then the Major settled his Imperial cap on his dark hair, nodded briskly to Jyn, and strode through the door. Jyn said something soft to the Bothan, who flashed a few white teeth at her in a terrified parody of a smile. She turned and saw him peering through the crack in the door. Her eyebrow lifted, her mouth twitching into a smile.

Jyn’s eyes locked with his, and for a moment, the world turned green and quiet. His heart slowed in his chest, his skin warmed despite the chilled air of the station, and Cassian knew deep in his bones that they were going to make it.

“Ready,” she said, lifting her hand, and Cassian pushed open the closet door and cautiously stepped out. The Bothan, he noted, took great care to be absorbed in their console screen, the faint greenish light turning their beige fur a sickly color. But Jyn didn’t waste time explaining anything, nor did she speak again to the slave who had clearly risked everything to help them. (How had she done this? How had she gained so much trust in only a few days? Someday, he swore, he was going to know the answer to that question.) She reached out for his wrist again, either ignoring or oblivious to the way her touch lit up his skin and kicked his heart rate into overdrive again. She pulled him without further ceremony through the door and into The Shift. Cassian stretched his legs to keep up with her, both of them ducking their heads as they passed under the security camera mounted outside the office door.

When they were through, Cassian lifted his head, and jerked to an abrupt halt.

The world around him exploded with noise and color. Throngs of people surged around him through the grey metal walls – except these walls were soaring and far apart, and covered over in neon signs and hanging banners, the silent ghosts in the walls overwhelmed by the press of vivid living bodies in front of them. Yells, wails, laughter, the cresting wave of a million voices babbling in a million languages crashed over his head and rang between his ears, drowning out any coherent thought. Screaming, someone nearby was _screaming_ – he whipped his head around but it was just children, not shrieks of terror but delight as they chased one another through the crowds, exasperated parents shouting behind them. Bright flashing colored lights, purple signs and red flashing security lights, blue and green and orange and yellow all assaulting his eyes as the scent of simmering grease, baked goods, the stink of various species’ sweat and perfumes and oh, fuck, _this_ was what madness felt like, _this_ was hell, and he staggered to the side into

Into Jyn, who looped her arm around his waist again and towed him forward, and he ignored the stab of guilt when he latched his arm around her shoulders and let her. Yes, he was pushing again, always pushing into her space, first the letter and then the hug and now this pathetic display, but Force help him, if he wanted to get them both off this fucking station, he had to move, and if he waited until he was acclimated to this chaotic hellscape they would be trapped here for far too long. They didn’t have time for him to adjust.

A flash of a blurry face in the wall next to him, level with his head, and Cassian stumbled but turned his eyes away. Let the ghosts stay here. Let them stay here. This was where they belonged, but he didn’t. He was not dead. Jyn was too warm against his side, his pulse was too quick in his veins, and the terror was too raw in his chest. He was not dead. He would not stay.

“Tea shop,” Jyn’s lips brushed against his ear; she had stretched up on her toes to speak directly into his ear in a low voice. She could have shouted over the noise, but she didn’t, and Cassian closed his eyes and allowed himself to tilt his head down towards her for just a brief moment. No time to dwell in it, but at least she gave him that. “Remember?” Jyn dropped back to the balls of her feet and pulled him past a fragrant shop that smelled of too many things to identify, so he took a short, choking breath and kept walking.

“Rob it,” he managed to grate out, and glanced at her from the corner of his eye in time to see the brilliance of her quiet smile. “Theoretically,” he added quickly, and tore his gaze away before he stumbled again.

“I didn’t, you know,” her fingers curled around the thick brown belt at his waist, fingertips pressing into the tense muscles of his hip around the leather. He shivered again, but she didn’t comment on it, thankfully. “Rob it. Not this one, anyway.”

The short laugh that tore out of him surprised them both, and Cassian shook his head like he was trying to clear water from it while Jyn merely hugged him closer to her side. Any tighter, and she would be carrying him through the cacophony of the battle again. No, not battle, shopping center. The cacophony of the shopping center. This was not Scarif. There was no battle. He was not bleeding, she was not struggling to pull him away from the burning tower in their wake.

They were not dying.

They were going home.

“I moved to a different dock,” Jyn was saying somewhere under the noise, and Cassian risked raising his head and looking around. The grey metal had given way once again to white walls (damn, he had been so focused on walking, on keeping his face calm and his arm tight around Jyn that he hadn’t even noticed the checkpoint between The Shift and the Outer Docking bays). In front of him, a grey metal door barred him from – yes, there it was, the familiar profile of their U-Wing visible through the small silvery viewport.

 The grey door slid open, he smelled metal and recycled ship air and the faint tang of steeping tea.

“Come on,” Jyn murmured, and he followed her onboard. She dropped her arm the moment the U-Wing hatch closed behind them (Cassian managed to fight the shiver back this time, swallow it down and hold himself still until the urge faded). “Launch in five,” she called over her shoulder, bolting for the cockpit. “There’s tea.” She jabbed a finger toward the fold-out stove top, where a small yellow kettle was magnetically locked to the burner, and a faint whiff of scented steam curled up from the spout.

Cassian eyed it, his hands bare and useless at his sides. He took an abortive step towards it, a dim instinct to obey her unspoken order ( _drink, relax, let me handle this_ ), and then he turned and walked to the seat tucked into the corner by the U-Wing hatch. The scuffed grey metal of the seat made him flinch, but it was too dull, entirely non-reflective, and Cassian forced himself to sit down and brace his hands on his knees.

The brown fabric was worn soft beneath his palms.

The U-Wing engines spooled up beneath the floor, and he lurched slightly as the U-Wing pulled a little gracelessly out of the dock. In the cockpit behind him, he heard Jyn curse under her breath. Part of him wanted to walk into the cockpit and offer to fly them out, get his hands on the controls and get them the hells away from this place. Bad idea though; Jyn would probably take it as an insult to her flying, and anyway, he wasn’t all that steady at the moment. His head ached from the assault to his senses in The Shift, and his heartrate kept randomly spiking. The clothes felt odd on his body, either too light or too heavy, and his hand were still slick with cold sweat.

The U-Wing bumped a little as she spun up the hyperspace drive, and then he was thrown forward as she pushed them roughly into lightspeed. It wasn’t, he reflected, the _worst_ flying he had ever experienced.

“Sorry,” she said from over his shoulder, and Cassian spun in his seat to look up at her.

Jyn was leaning against the grey bulkhead. Cassian stared at the wall over her shoulder for a cautious moment…but the wrong color grey, not shiny or run through with delicate circuits, no ghostly reflections at all, it was simply dull and empty and serviceable grey metal.

“I really didn’t like that eblerite shit,” she said slowly, and he snapped his gaze back to her face. She was watching him through half-closed eyes, wary, careful. He must look like a wreck.

His eye suddenly caught on the folded-up grey datapad clipped on her belt, and his stomach lurched as he remembered the last message he had sent to her, and the last she had sent to him. He shoved himself up to his feet and stepped towards her, the panic surging in his chest again. “What happened?”  

Jyn’s green eyes widened again, and then she took a deep breath. “You mean that last message, right?”

He nodded, afraid to elaborate any more, afraid to bring up his own message unless she did first. “I got boarded,” she said with a shrug.

 _“What?”_ Jyn held up her hands, stepping back a little in response to his outburst, and he closed his eyes, leaned against the (dull, empty, lifeless) metal bulkhead. “Sorry,” he muttered.

“There was a general search going on in the docks,” she explained. “A few hours ago. Or…days? Days for you, right?”

Cassian looked up, and saw that she had moved close again, just within arm’s reach, her hands still raised between them. He studied her face, noting the careful way she moved, the faint flush in her skin, the painful brilliance of her green eyes and brown hair and even her kriffing clothes, dark green, faded brown, pale blue, all so colorful, all so _alive_. “I was forwarding your last data report from the Archives while I was also in the middle of writing that message. When the boarding party reached my dock, I had to hit Send All to get the report through in time, and then wiped the databank in case they searched it.” She bit her lip for a second, white teeth leaving a small white indent in her reddish-pink lower lip. “I couldn’t stop them from inspecting the ship, not without raising suspicion, so I let them walk through and then I swept for bugs. I was _very_ thorough,” she emphasized, which seemed a bit odd until he looked closer at her face and realized that she was…she was worried that he was angry at her. Angry with her? For what? For the Imperials getting in her face? For doing the only thing she could do to keep cover? Why would she think…?

“Good call,” he said at last, ignoring the rasp of his voice, trying not to shift his weight or fidget with the collar of this strange, lightweight blue shirt. Trying not to get distracted by the yellow kettle or the pale purple shirt he could just see peeking out of the open zipper of her green and tan duffel nearby. The dark brown leather jacket on Jyn’s shoulders gleamed faintly in the yellow-white light of the U-Wing cargo bay, and his fingers itched to reach out and touch it, to touch the pink skin of her cheek and the tiny, defined black eyelashes that surrounded the bright green he had seen over and over in his dreams –

Jyn’s hand was on his chest. “ _Cassian,_ ” she said sharply, and he snapped upright, startled at the touch, at the sound of his name.

“Hey,” she said soothingly, pulling her hand back from his chest. “It’s okay. It’s just…it’s okay, Cassian. I won’t touch you, sorry.” She stepped back again, turning a bit away from him and making a point of keeping her hands in his sight.

The place on his chest where her touch had been almost burned with the cold her absence left.

“No,” he said, or perhaps snarled, he wasn’t entirely sure, and he knew he was being ridiculous, needy, selfish but oh, _que esto no sea un sueño, please, just let me have this one thing._ “Don’t…” He paused, sighed. “It’s…fine.”

A weak statement, and a little pointless, but it was the best he could come up with. Jyn stopped, her hand hovering awkwardly between them, and something vulnerable and uncertain softened her features and darkened her eyes. She shifted her weight, tilted her chin, took a deep breath – Jyn did not fidget, not really, but Cassian had long figured out that her lack of movement was by training and not by nature. She forced herself to be still, clearly fighting the urge to move away (or move closer? Maybe, perhaps, but he couldn’t be sure unless - )

Cassian stepped forward, into her hand. Her fingers splayed automatically against his ribs, her palm over his sternum, and he was making a mess of this, he was almost sure, but the warmth that flooded back under her hand was worth it.

“You asked me to stay.”

Both Cassian and Jyn jumped, as if the sound of her voice had startled them both. Cassian stared at her, watching a bright pink flush bloom in her face. Her jaw tightened, she took a deep breath, and then the color in her face faded back to a warm but less obvious hue. Jyn tilted her chin up and raised an eyebrow at him, daring him to comment. Cassian’s mouth twitched at the corner. Impressive control.

And then he steeled himself (because maybe he was still screwing this up, but she had asked and he was way past the point of pretending that he hadn’t meant what he’d written), and said softly, “I did.”

Her hand was still so warm against his chest, and solid. He could anchor himself on that small point of contact. The whole crazy unbalanced galaxy could turn on the axis between his skin and hers and find it’s equilibrium again.

“You said,” she shifted her weight, caught herself, and stilled. “You said you had nothing to give me.”

The warmth under her hand stayed, but the rest of his skin felt the whisper of Certh’s cold grey air, a memory of blurred reflections in the corner of his eye.

“I don’t,” he agreed, lower, rougher.

Jyn’s fingers clenched into a fist, knuckles hard against his sternum, and his heart dropped into his stomach. Her voice, when she spoke next, was calm, clear, and precise as lasers.

“Bantha shit.”

He blinked.

“You said you would try,” she added, and her fist pressed against his chest a little harder, almost knocking him back a step before she abruptly opened her fist and dug her fingers into his shirt. The light material pulled tight around his back and sides and under his arms; Cassian imagined he could feel every woven strand of the synth-cotton where it touched him, he could feel the weight of his new brown belt and the soft scratch of every inch of his brown trousers, the thick socks and the worn boots encasing his feet, the jacket almost heavy across his shoulders. He could feel his blood humming through his veins, and the brush of recycled air against his face and neck and hands.

He could feel the heat radiating off Jyn’s body in the small space between them.

“Cassian,” she repeated, her eyes narrowing and her voice dropping into an intense murmur, “you said you would try.”

He nodded. He could feel the skin on his neck pull tight with the movement, hells, he could feel the cold air scraping through his nose, he was so fucking overstimulated and his heart was still racing, his skin aching with the sensations assaulting him, and it was perhaps a bit sick how badly he wanted to throw himself into Jyn’s arms again but he couldn’t stop. He’d been wrapped in suffocating grey fear for months and now he was ripped bare and exposed and just so fucking _relieved_. So he looked her directly in her green eyes and answered her questions, and damn the consequences. The time to lie was over and all he had in that moment was painful, blistering honesty.

(All he had was the smile on her face when they snuck into Scarif, he had the strength of her arm dragging him staggering down the beach, he had the phantom press of her body in his bed the night after they had evacuated Yavin and she had slipped in and lain close without a word. All he had was hope.)

“You asked me to stay already, you know,” Jyn lifted her free hand and took another hard grip of his shirt. The move pulled her in closer, and Cassian’s body tightened in response, a shiver racing through him. He let it happen. He didn’t move in closer, it was too…much. Too much to ask, too much to presume, so he stayed still and watched as Jyn shuffled a little closer.

“On Yavin. When you woke up,” Jyn clarified. “You asked me to stay and be your partner.” She hesitated slightly on the last word, but Cassian was ready for this, at least, so he nodded again, forced his voice to be as level as he could make it.

“You are my partner. As long as you want to be. And if that’s all you want,” he straightened, and permitted himself to finally lift one bare, cold hand and gently curl his fingers over her wrist. The edge of her brown leather gloves pressed against his thumb in a distinct line, the cheap material of her green shirt brushing his pinkie, and her pulse beat against his fingertips. “If that’s all you want,” he forced his attention back on track. Honesty, Cassian Andor. It was time to be honest. “That’s enough. I promise.”

“And if I want…” she bit her lip again, another brief white indent against her lip, and Cassian’s other hand twitched before he made himself look away. “Your letter,” Jyn said. “What you said. What you asked. What you hoped.” She grimaced, and then shrugged her shoulders suddenly, irritation and determination mixing in her face. “Cassian,” she said again (it almost made him laugh; he’d heard his name more in the last hour than he had in the last few months, and it was throwing him off balance every time), “I want to stay.” Her surety seemed to falter, and she shifted her weight again, her fingers tightening on his shirt and then loosening again, her nerves overriding her careful self control. “If you will too,” she muttered, and dropped her gaze. He had the impression that if he hadn’t been holding her wrist, she might have let go and moved away again, giving him space.

Cassian didn’t want _space_.

As delicately as if she were blown glass, or a sensitive droid core drive, Cassian touched his free hand’s fingertips to her jaw.

Jyn raised her head and met his gaze again. Whatever she saw on his face made her own soften, her lips curving up and her eyes bright.

Certh was suddenly very, very far away.

“Jyn,” he tasted the word on his tongue, felt the shape of it in his mouth, a hard bite followed by a soft hum. “Stay with me.”

The curve of her mouth bloomed into a full smile, her eyes crinkling at the corners and her cheeks a little pink again, and this time she didn’t bother to control it. “Yeah.” She leaned closer; Cassian’s world turned green and quiet. “I will.”

Her hands flattened, and she ran her palms up to his shoulders, trailing heat in their wake. Cassian closed his eyes, dipped his head, and let his hand drift from her wrist to her waist. She didn’t pull away, didn’t push it off, and most importantly, didn’t freeze under his touch.

Instead, she stepped forward, rose up on her toes, and kissed him.

The first soft touch of her lips to his ran like a shock all down his body, from the top of his spine to the soles of his feet, and he gasped. Jyn didn’t pull away, though, she swallowed the sound, caught his breath and stole the rest of it. _Thief_ , she had called him, and he would have laughed now at the irony of such praise from her if he had the time to spare. Instead, he leaned down into the promise of her kiss, cupped his hands around her face and threw himself willingly, joyously, into the sensation of her arms wrapping around his neck. She arched up and her body curved to fit against his, and Cassian staggered under the onslaught of heat and pressure, the friction of cloth on his skin, the whisper of her breath ghosting over his cheek and stirring his short hair. His beard scraped lightly against her, and he could feel the way she smiled in response.

The tiny movement seemed to break through the haze in his mind, and Cassian’s eyes snapped open, his head jerked up. Jyn stared up at him, her eyes wide and startled. Against his chest, he felt her heartrate suddenly spike and her muscles turn rigid. Her lips were redder now than before, her skin still flushed and warm, but the bright light in her eyes had turned wary again. “Okay?” She asked in a brittle tone, as if he had just pulled out a grenade.

“Real,” Cassian explained, sounding stunned even to himself. The wary expression on her face didn’t fade; if anything, it darkened, and he felt her arms loosening, her weight shifting back. He realized a beat too late that she didn’t understand – she hadn’t been on Certh, she had only known what was happening through the carefully curated messages he had dared to send her. Mostly curated.

“It’s real,” he tried again. “This.” He jerked his head to the side to indicate the U-Wing around them, the old metal bulkheads rattling in hyperspace, the faint scent of tea mingling with air purifiers.  “You.” He bent again, and hid his face against her neck. Her pulse thrummed against his cheek, her warmth seeped into him and he sent up a silent thanks to the Force or the universe or whatever when he felt her arms tighten around him again.

“Yeah,” she said into his ear. “It is.” Her muscles relaxed, she turned her head and kissed the bare expanse of his cheek along the carefully trimmed line of his goatee. Cassian wondered what her lips would feel like in that same spot when his beard grew back in, but most of his attention was absorbed by the unfolding revelation that she understood what he was trying to say. “It is, Cassian.”

Cassian squeezed his eyes shut against the curve of her neck. He breathed in her scent, looped his arms around her ribs and hugged her tight. Jyn leaned back against him just as hard, fit tightly against his body like she was meant to be there, and holding him as with a ferocity that both soothed his raw nerves and set a slow-burning fire in his blood. He pushed down the smoldering beginnings of need, though; there would be time for that later. For now, Jyn held him close and stood with her feet braced against the slight shuddering of the ship, and he leaned into her and let her steady him until he could find his feet again.

Somewhere outside the U-Wing, he knew, the war still raged. He knew that people lived and died and fought for the right to choose between the two, machines exploded in fire and rained hot metal down, spies slipped through deadly shadows and soldiers staggered across hostile terrain, and somewhere in space, great cruisers and destroyers clashed in titanic rage. But in here, in the U-Wing, there was no sound save the hum of the engine and the steady breathing of two people who had found (or perhaps stolen) a moment of peace.

It wouldn’t last, it couldn’t, but Cassian listened to the steady beat of Jyn’s heartbeat against his skin and allowed himself to push away the future. The war would catch up to them eventually, but right now, they had this.

“Jyn,” he whispered, just to taste it again, to feel his lips moving against her skin and the little shiver she gave in response.

He could feel her smile against his temple, because she understood that, too. “Yeah. Welcome home.”

 

* * *

 

 

[Day 1 / 0217 GST / Galactic Standard Calendar]

 

PRIORITY MESSAGE

[Please Enter Passkey]

Passkey: ****************************

[Passkey Accepted]

[Decrypting…]

[Decrypting…]

[Read Message Y/N?]

 

From: Big Red

To: Still Here

 

All reports received. Analysts happy. Report to Delta Base for debrief and new tasking.

May the Force Be With You.

 

[Delete Message Y/N?]

 

 

“Jyn? What is it?”

“Draven. We’re redirected to Delta Base.”

“That’s another three days away.”

“Mm.”

“...what?”

“Just wondering how we’ll fill the time.”

“Come back here.”

“Good start.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The name Jyn set for herself in her inbox is a tiny reference to the companion piece I'm trying to write for this story, telling some of it from Jyn's POV. It's pretty low on the list right now, though, so for the moment, it's not that important.


End file.
